Embers
by uphill09
Summary: Enjolras starts law school, and a girl named Eponine starts getting under his skin. Modern AU.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own any rights to Les Miserables or any of the characters.

Hey guys! So I'm not necessarily new to the fandom, but it's been a long, long time. I wrote some pretty extensive neurotically-resarched Les Mis fics years ago on another account, but this is the first Enjonine one, and the first Modern AU. Please let me know what you think!

* * *

Embers

There is grime under her fingernails. This is the first thing he notices about her, because she sits down next to him at the bus stop and starts to very intently and methodically pry it out with the nail of her right thumb, scraping at it and flicking it off and moving on to the next finger.

Enjolras isn't really looking at her so much as noticing it out of the corner of his eye. There is a curtain of long blonde hair concealing her face, frizzy and streaked with gold, as unruly as a child's. Her boots are so worn that sole of the left one is drooping to the ground, and then she starts tap tap tapping just the one foot against the concrete and it is no wonder why.

He shifts his eyes away from her deliberately and tries to ignore the sounds of her, all the scratching and the tapping and the breathing so close to him. He arrives at this bus stop every day at the precise same time, sits in this precise same side of the bench, and waits alone. In class he is surrounded by anxious overachievers sweating and grinding their teeth their way through Torts. At home he has four other roommates bursting at the gills in an apartment that can barely hold them. But here, at this bus stop on this shady road, at this one salvation from smell of stale beer and the other students' fear, is his island. His peace. _His_ bus stop.

"You got a light?"

He almost says no.

"You shouldn't smoke," he says instead, but imperceptible brush against his bag and he can feel the outline of his old lighter in his front pocket.

She turns to face him, and then she flashes him one unexpected and blinding smile. She is not exactly pretty, but she is so unselfconscious with her crinkling eyes and her crooked bottom teeth that for one brief moment he is disarmed by the effect of her.

"Hypocrite," she says with a careless lilt to her voice. She holds her palm out expectedly, and without really consciously deciding to he slides his hand into his bag and pulls out the lighter. His hand brushes hers and he tries not to cringe as he thinks about the grime.

He sees the bus at the bottom of the hill. They have maybe thirty seconds before it reaches them, but she lights the cigarette anyway. Enjolras watches the flame lick in and out of the air with a deft flick of her finger and feels the familiar ache for the smell of smoke before she even so much as lifts the cigarette to her mouth.

He's been trying to quit. Not quite successfully. He sucks in an unwitting breath of it and hates her a little bit for being here, for distracting him with her foot-tapping and her cigarette-smoking in this one sacred time he has carved out in his day. It's been nine days since he had a smoke and he's not going to cave in now because some wily teenage girl lit up in front of him for half a second.

As the bus approaches he stands and hoists his bag up over his shoulder. The girl doesn't move, sitting contentedly on the bench, trying and failing to blow out a neat ring of smoke, contorting her lips and wheezing with the effort. She catches him watching and her eyes glint shamelessly.

The doors open and she still hasn't moved. Enjolras doesn't realize that he's hesitating until she speaks.

"I'm not getting on the bus, bourgeois boy," she says. She flicks a few ashes of the cigarette and he watches one of the embers flick to the ground at her feet.

After he has settled into his seat and the bus begins to pull away, he sees the reflection of her through the window: she leaps up from the bench, and in motion her layers of loose fabric cling to her to reveal a scrawny, disorganized assembly of limbs. He wonders if he just gave a light to a minor. He wonders who is driving the old pick-up truck she is clambering into. He wonders why mere seconds ago she was grinning madly over a little flame and now she is not smiling at all.

* * *

He doesn't run into her again for a month.

"You're not actually _seeing_ that guy, are you?"

Enjolras enters the apartment after a particularly grueling line of questioning from one of his professors that lasted the better part of the lecture to hear Marius talking at their cheap excuse for a kitchen table.

"Who, 'Parnasse?"

Her voice rattles, low and husky. She has not been at his bus stop in all this time and he has not spared her a thought beyond their first encounter, but he is acutely aware of her identity before he finishes entering the threshold.

"Yeah," says Marius. From the entry way their backs are both turned to him. Neither even turns to acknowledge that he has entered the apartment.

She shakes her head, her thin shoulders hunching. Her sweater is draped over the chair, her shoulder bag strewn out on the floor, her hair loose and tangled down her back. There is not a single part of her contained.

"No, no, no," she says, a little too emphatically. She pauses, and then says in a measured tone, "No, I'm not—of course not. Montparnasse is a friend of my dad's, he just—he's got a car, is all."

Enjolras can hear the scowl in Marius's voice. "Good. I don't like him."

The girl shrugs again, and leans closer to Marius, the fabric of her gauzy shirt grazing his skin. "I'm not interested in guys like him," she says, leaning, leaning, leaning.

Enjolras sets his bag down on the counter and she visibly flinches, drawing herself back.

"Hey, Enjolras," says Marius, who is either used to the girl's mannerisms or oblivious. Enjolras suspects the latter. Of all his roommates Marius might be the most well-intentioned, but it does him very little good with his complete ignorance of most social cues. He gestures to the scrawny girl from bus stop and says, "This is my friend Eponine."

Eponine nods in his direction, but her eyes don't leave the floor.

"Hello," says Enjolras stiffly, still reeling from the stress of his professor's rapid fire demands.

Her lids brush up and she briefly regards him. "Hey," she says, with a shyness that he wouldn't have thought she was capable of. She looks away, but not before he sees that her pale cheeks are inflamed. She pushes a chunk of matted yellow hair behind her ear and turns back to Marius.

"Eponine was my neighbor before I moved in with you guys," Marius explains. "Eponine, Enjolras is a student at the law—"

"Don't you have a class right now, Pontmercy?" Enjolras interrupts.

Marius's eyes flicker over to the over clock. "Oh, shoot," he says, clamoring up from the table. "Why didn't you say something?" he chides Eponine.

"I'm not your social secretary," she says, gaining back some of her wits.

"If you run you'll catch the 12:10," says Enjolras.

Marius is almost halfway out the door when he stops short. "Is your ride coming?" he asks Eponine.

"I'll call him."

"I got her," says Courfeyrac, emerging from the living room.

Eponine shakes her head. "I'm fine."

"Get in the Prius, kid."

"Courf—"

In one swift motion Courfeyrac yanks her jacket off of the chair and plops it over her head by the hood, shielding her eyes. "Shake a leg, I've got to go to the library anyway."

Marius shouts a goodbye to Eponine and slams the front door behind him. She wrestles the hood of the coat off of her face and stares at the door for a beat too long, her hair making a frizzy halo around her forehead. Courfeyrac jingles his keys and she turns to him and grumbles, "You don't have to drive me."

"And you don't _have _to give my advice on picking up hot nerds at the library on the way there. But you'll do it anyway. Because you're a pal," says Courfeyrac, in his usual conciliatory way.

She snorts outright and swats at him, hitting him square in the stomach, and the gesture is so familiar, like she has gone through the motions of this same kind of banter with him hundreds of times. Enjolras presses himself against the counter to walk past them in the narrow space of the kitchen and wonders how much else goes on in this apartment without him knowing. Who is this person who has installed herself into the lives of his friends without even a shred of his awareness?

Combeferre is always on his case about being a recluse. This is the first time he has wondered if there's any truth to it.

"See you around."

It takes Enjolras a moment to realize that she's talking to him. By the time he turns his head the two of them are out the door and the apartment is finally, mercifully _quiet_. He sinks into the couch and stares at the blank television screen and hears himself breathe for what feels like the first time in months.

* * *

A week later she is sitting on the front steps of their apartment. It's raining, a cold mist of a spray, the kind that doesn't make enough noise to rattle a window with any satisfaction but still leaves a miserable chill in the air. She is wearing the same thin jacket and the same raggedy boots, the mane of hair matted against her neck.

He stops and regards her for a moment, and realizes from the challenge in her eyes that she noticed him approaching long before he noticed her sitting there.

"Get up," he says.

She shakes her head. "I'm waiting for Marius."

Her chin is raised, her eyes defiant, but she is quivering like a blade of grass in the wind. He offers her his hand to help her up and she raises an eyebrow at him.

Enjolras drops his hand. He has a mountain of reading to do and no time to deal with this surly teenager. "Marius is out to dinner with Courfeyrac and his family," he says, maybe a little meaner than he should.

"Oh." Her disappointment is evident. "Nobody told me," she says.

Enjolras feels the muscles in his shoulders loosen. She's just a stupid kid. "Come inside."

"I come over every Friday night," she says, mostly to herself, still sitting on the steps.

They forgot about her, then. Enjolras doesn't have much trouble believing that Marius is careless enough to do just that, but he is a little surprised at Courfeyrac, who usually goes out of his way to make sure nobody is excluded—even those most reluctant to partake in his antics, as Enjolras knows all too well. He wonders how long she's been sitting here. He wonders if she has any idea that of all the neighborhoods near the campus this is probably one of the worst to be lurking in alone at night.

He regards her, the incongruity of her careless posture and her wide watching eyes, and decides that she knows and doesn't care. A lecture would be wasted on her.

"Well the next bus isn't coming for at least a half an hour," Enjolras says, even though she probably knows this already. He starts walking toward the apartment and says gruffly, "Wait inside until then."

She's so quiet that he doesn't realize she has followed him until he hears the drip-drip-drip of her wet coat on the dry cement under the awning. "Leave your coat out here," he says, and she dumps it on the ground without any ceremony and wrings her hair out over it.

As the lock unclicks and they enter the apartment he feels a pang of annoyance, not too different from the one that he felt the first time he encountered her. He can count on one hand the number of times he has had this apartment to himself. And here she is, with her shivering and her ragged breathing and her brown eyes swimming up at him curiously.

"Stay there," he says, and comes back from the clean laundry pile with a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.

"These are Marius's."

Enjolras's eyes flicker over to the open textbooks on the living room table. "I'm sure he won't mind."

She slinks into the bathroom, leaving wet footprints on their shoddy carpet. He resumes a chapter on property law with such intensive focus that a half hour passes without his notice, and when the rain picks up and he stares out the window he finally notices her on the other couch, curled into one of the corners with her eyes shut and her skinny arms wrapped around her knees.

She is pale and heavy-lidded, her features almost comically large, exaggerated by her skinniness. There is nothing dainty about her in waking life, but asleep she is fragile, her toes perfectly curled into her feet, her damp hair curling at the nape of her neck.

One of the sleeves of Marius's old t-shirt is pushed up against the fabric of the couch and he can see the distinct outline of a bruise, of the fingers that must have wrapped around her arm and pulled. His scowl deepens. He tries to turn back to the textbook but he is feeling suddenly cynical, suddenly impatient and angry and useless.

Three years. Three years until he finishes law school. But seeing this strange girl curled up on the couch, quick to trust and quick to sleep, and it suddenly feels a lot longer than that.

* * *

Enjolras doesn't hate parties. What he hates is wasting time, and this is a prime example of it. Nobody here has anything worthwhile to say, and if they do the alcohol has effectively numbed it out of them. Enjolras walks out to the back porch with the half a beer he has been nursing all night, too edgy, too stiff, too sober.

There she is.

"Stop, 'Parnasse," she says, batting some boy off of her. He is as unnaturally skinny as she is, his dark hair slicked with grease, his smile sly and slow. Without paying any heed to her words his fingers slide up her side, goosing her ribs, edging too close to the small swell of her breast.

Enjolras isn't going to say anything until he sees her wince. "Hey," he says, too loudly, taking a stilted step toward them.

The boy doesn't look over, but Eponine does. "Hey," she says back, her eyes lighting up in recognition.

The boy's hand is now snaking up her thigh. She's staring at Enjolras and doesn't seem to notice. "She said to stop," Enjolras says.

Eponine laughs and the boy's face twists into a sneer. "Who the fuck are you," he says, but before it escalates Eponine chirps agreeably: "Is Marius here?"

The boy huffs a disgusted breath of air, removing his hand with such force that Eponine wobbles and has to catch her balance on the porch ledge. "Of course you know these pricks," he mutters, spitting on the porch. "Jesus, 'Ponine."

The boy leaves, and suddenly the porch is too quiet. There is a couple making out a few feet away, and a few drunk girls muttering on the steps in whispers and shrill laughter, but other than that it is just the pair of them, Enjolras shifting his weight between his feet stiffly while Eponine hugs her arms to her chest against the cold. She stares up at him without much expectation and takes a swig of something out of a red cup.

"You're underage," says Enjolras.

She finishes the swig and wipes her mouth off with her sleeve. "Says who?"

"Are you even a student here?" he asks, suspecting the worst. Suspecting she is still in high school, and his friends really are thick-skulled enough to let her follow them around despite the fact that this is one hundred percent illegal.

He is expecting some sort of guilt or maybe even fear now that he has caught her. Instead the space between her brows puckers and she says indignantly, "I could have been. I got in."

"Then why aren't you?"

Her chin juts out. "I don't have the money."

"So you take out loans," says Enjolras practically.

She shakes her head and stares into her drink as if she is considering it. "It's not that simple," she says, and her eyes flit to the door into the party, where the boy from before is somewhere lost in the crowd. "If I took out a loan – my family …" She shakes her head again and makes a sloppy, indistinct gesture. "Besides, what's school going to teach me that I don't already know?"

Enjolras has a feeling she doesn't actually want his opinion on the matter. "So what do you do instead?"

His question is stilted but she doesn't care. "I bartend."

"You do _not_."

"I'm nineteen," she says. "There's nothing illegal about me _serving_ alcohol."

"And during the day?"

She shrugs at him. "I find work." She slides off the ledge of the porch without offering to clarify, and takes another slow sip of beer. He wonders how someone so small isn't on the floor by now when he feels himself buzzing after half a drink. "You're a law student, then. How old are you?"

"Twenty-three."

"You talk like an old man."

"Maybe I am one."

After a beat her lips crack into a wry and unexpected grin. "Marius never talks about you," she says. "I only knew you existed because of all the law books in the living room. "

"He never talks about you, either."

Her little mouth contorts and in an instant he can see the wet, shining hurt in her eyes. "Oh," she says.

It wasn't his intention to offend her. She sets the drink down on the ledge and crosses her arms in front of her chest. It's late in October now, the winter wind nipping at their heels. Every other girl here is dressed in something short and low, stumbling in heels so high and outfits so inadequate that their knees and elbows are bright red with the chill. They look foolish. In her jeans and her raggedy coat, Eponine does not.

He wants to tell her this. To make up for whatever offense he has just committed. But it's at that precise moment that she heaves a long, indulgent sigh and he realizes – she is infatuated. With _Pontmercy_.

"I mean," he says. "We don't talk much as it is."

"I'm going back inside," she says flatly.

The curtain of scraggly blonde hair falls over her eyes as she passes him, heading for the open door, for the throng of sweating bodies, for the sticky floors and the thrum of the bass beating like a heartbeat in the walls.

He reaches out for her. He means to touch her arm but she is gesturing something to herself and his hand hooks with hers. She looks up at him, her wide eyes searching his face, but she doesn't pull her hand away.

Instead he drops it, and her arm falls like a rag doll's back at her side.

"How are you getting home?"

The laugh on her lips is bitter beyond her years. "Oh, Enjolras," she says. Something unfamiliar in him stirs at the sound of her saying his name. "I'm not."


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I do not own any rights to Les Miserables or any of the characters.

* * *

Embers

Enjolras goes home for Thanksgiving and it is only a slight variation of the same. His mother is overly-plucked and shining from what he suspects is another round of botox, a tight smile plastered on her face that never meets her eyes. His father drinks too much and pats him on the back too hard and talks about how his firm just got some high-off-his-mind congressman out of a DUI and how he can't wait for Enjolras to join the family practice. His little brother stares sullenly at him from across the table and doesn't offer much besides "pass the salt."

By the time he arrives back at campus, Eponine is in jail.

It is an uncommon series of events that leads to him learning of this. He comes back to campus a day early because he has heard back from a prospective summer internship with a public defender living in the city. The offices are closed for the holiday so the man suggests that they meet in the café next to the police department after he finishes talking to a defendant. Enjolras is waiting for him in the station when he sees Eponine sidle up to a payphone with a black eye and a tall security guard standing over her.

She doesn't see Enjolras sitting there. He watches her wait for it to ring and then hears her ragged voice talk into the speaker: "Christ, Dad. Pick up the phone. _Please_."

He is staring at her. He doesn't mean to be, but suddenly there is nowhere else to look. Her hair is matted and greasy, her cheeks sunken, the unblemished eye wide.

"Hello," she says.

He is frozen in his seat. "What—what are you—"

She shakes her head. "Don't tell the others."

He's on his feet now, so quickly that the guard slouching by Eponine stands at attention.

"Eponine," he says, uselessly. He stares at the guard. There's nothing he can do for her here, and it makes his blood feel hot under his skin. "What are you _doing_ here?"

She purses her lips. There is a vein twitching by her eye. "Don't tell the others," she says again. "Please."

And then she's gone.

* * *

He's taken to studying in one of the cafés a mile or so off grounds. There are fewer undergraduates here, and although there is plenty of noise from nine-to-fives bustling in and out, it's the kind of noise he can endure without losing his focus.

"Excuse me?"

Her voice sounds like honey. He looks up to a fresh-faced, red-cheeked girl with a long plait of glossy brown hair cascading down her back, a few loose curls framing her warm eyes.

"Do you mind if I borrow your salt?"

"Go ahead."

Her smile is wide and bright, entirely inappropriate for such a small favor but genuine nonetheless. "Thanks," she trills. "I'll bring it right back."

Enjolras means to turn back to the court proceedings he is mangling with a highlighter, but his eyes unwittingly trail up and follow her as she crosses the room. He may be intense, he may be studious, but despite Courfeyrac's constant teasing and Jehan's constant clucking, he is not immune. He can admire the gentle curve of her lithe frame, the bright eyes and curled lashes, the tight hug of her jeans and the swivel of her hips.

She sits down on one of the couches by the window, perching prettily against the edge, her posture straight, engaged in reading a paperback novel. He imagines she would be sweet to come home to after a long day. He imagines that she bakes and knits and leads community service groups. He imagines that she'll marry young and have chubby-cheeked babies and that the sparkling wit he saw in her eyes will go entirely to waste.

He's about to look back down at his notes when the door bursts open and the bell rings and in comes Eponine, her nose and her gloveless knuckles red from the cold.

"Hey!" she says, her eyebrows lifting and her eyes lighting up at the girl perched with the book. The shiner has since healed. Enjolras hasn't seen her in a week.

"Eponine," says the pretty girl, smiling again, all white teeth and soft lips. She stands up to embrace Eponine, and Enjolras wonders why it is so shocking to him that Eponine has friends outside of his apartment, especially this _normal_-looking friend who carries a monogrammed backpack and braids her hair with ribbon.

"Sorry I'm late."

"Hardly. I haven't seen you in _weeks_. How are you? How are your brother and sister?"

They've gotten up now and are leaving the café to walk along the downtown strip, so that's the last of the conversation Enjolras hears. A few hours later his head is pounding and his eyelids are heavy and he has gnawed the plastic of his highlighter to a pulp, so he finally gets up to call it a night. He's surprised to see that it's dark when he walks out the door. He checks his watch. The busses are still running for another hour.

"You know how I feel about you smoking, Ep."

"I hardly ever do it."

"Half that pack is gone!"

"You're such a worry wart."

"I wouldn't have to be, if you weren't so—"

"Enjolras?"

He doesn't know why he proceeded to walk so closely behind them, or why he is so shocked to have been discovered.

"Eponine," he says, halting in his tracks.

If there is any awkwardness it is gone as soon as it is there. Her eyes flit to his shoes and by the time she looks back up at him her jaw is set and her expression is neutral and nothing about her betrays a hint of the incident a week ago when he saw her at the police station.

He turns to look at her pretty friend, who is waiting for Eponine to introduce them.

"Oh," says Eponine. When he turns to her there is a wry curve to her upper lip. Did he stare at her friend too long? "Enjolras, this is my friend Cosette."

Cosette. It suits her.

"Nice to meet you," she says, her voice a relief on the ears after Eponine's, her hand cold and dainty in his when she reaches out to greet him.

He isn't feeling at all self-conscious until he turns back to Eponine, who has a mischievous, almost mocking glint in her eyes. "Cosette's single," she says, raising an eyebrow.

"Ep!" Cosette exclaims, a flattering blush erupting on her cheeks. "We broke up _last week!_"

"Oh, boo. You held hands like three times. Time to move on."

Enjolras clears his throat, feeling a twinge of annoyance, maybe even embarrassment. He doesn't want to look over at Eponine, with that knowing expression when she knows nothing at all, or Cosette, who is all at once bashful and charming and shy. He shouldn't have followed them. He doesn't want to be pulled into whatever game Eponine has concocted for him.

In that instant the green line pulls up to the bus stop. "This is me," says Cosette, leaning in and giving Eponine a fleeting hug. "Don't be a stranger."

Eponine barely waits until Cosette is out of earshot to turn to Enjolras and say, "She's beautiful, isn't she?"

"Are you okay?"

Eponine blinks at him, surprised by the question. She pushes a mop of hair behind her ear. "Yeah," she says tersely. "You?"

"That's not what I—"

Eponine shakes her head. "Thanks," she says. "For not telling anybody."

Enjolras spent a long while that night debating whether or not he should. Her gratitude doesn't make him feel any less uneasy about keeping his mouth shut.

"What _happened?" _

Cosette's bus pulls away and Eponine starts walking aimlessly around the stop, waiting for her the red line. "I'm not a criminal," she says.

"I never said you were."

"I wasn't the one doing anything, really," she says again, defensive, as if he has tried to tell her otherwise.

Enjolras doesn't say anything. He is a man of few words as it is, and he has learned from experience that dropping out of a conversation usually leaves a space people are all too willing to fill.

When she turns a round he sees the glint of a freshly-lit cigarette. His throat tightens. She takes a long, satisfying drag and says without looking at him, "My father—has these friends. One of the students here owed them money and wouldn't pay. And everyone left for Thanksgiving …" She shrugs, staring at the cigarette, dangling it with practice between her fingers. "I was just being the lookout, is all. But they caught me. Everyone else ran."

He nods solemnly.

"You think I'm a bad person."

"No, I don't."

"It's alright," she says. There is a wisp of smoke in front of her face. Enjolras wills himself not to breathe it in. "I am."

"You aren't." He says it so earnestly that she laughs outright, but he is not deterred by it. "You're not," he says again, and he wants to tell her that there is something so bare in her expressions, some vulnerability in her eyes and mischief in her lips and softness in her cheeks that convinces him, that makes him certain that she is good in her core. He does not know her but in this instant he wants to, so he can tell her this as a person she might believe instead of a near stranger.

Just then the lights of the approaching bus glare through the dark street. Eponine squints and looks away.

"I keep thinking that maybe if I'd done something different. But I don't think it matters," she says, her voice dipping low. "Things just are the way that they are."

Enjolras wishes she would look up. It's hard to tell if she ever means what she says. "Do you really believe that?" he asks, floundering. He is rarely at a loss for what to say and he wonders what it is about this girl that leaves him constantly feeling like he has fallen short.

She hums thoughtfully, gnawing on her lower lip. The bus pulls up to the stop. "This is you, isn't it?" she asks.

It's a ridiculous notion, but he wants to save her. He doesn't even know if she needs saving, and it feels presumptuous to think of himself as a person who is capable of saving anyone, but he is standing here with her and she is too young, she is too tired, she is too hopeless, and he is too inadequate to do anything to change her mind.

The door to the bus slides opens. Eponine cocks her head at it and gives him a weary smile.

As he hits the stairs he hears her say gleefully, "Let me know if you want Cosette's number!"

His cheeks burn and he doesn't turn around. By the time he finds himself a seat in the back of the bus she is gone, and there is nothing on the street but lights and shadow.

* * *

It snows on the first day in December, and when he comes home that night he hears what might possibly be the most atrocious sound his ears have ever endured. He can hear it from the sidewalk – he can only imagine that their neighbors are reeling in agony as he approaches the door, and the noise becomes louder, two unharmonious voices dropping in and out of tune with such vulgarity that he can't help but cringe.

He twists the doorknob open and entering the apartment is like an assault.

" … GOOD NIGHT, MOOOONLIGHT LADIES! ROCK A BYE SWEET BABY JAMES!"

From the threshold he can see shadows dancing in the living room. He takes a few steps further and watches, concealed by the wall.

It's Eponine again. Her hands are linked with Grantaire's and the two of them are spinning in drunk, happy circles, narrowly avoiding crashing into what few things they own in the room. They are breathless and insatiable, their bodies fast-moving and Eponine's gold hair flung in all directions, their smiles broad and red-cheeked and unfettered.

If Enjolras strains to listen he can hear James Taylor's gentle voice drowned out by the sound of Eponine and Grantaire's horrific singing. The music is soft and low and yet they persist, jumping and twisting and separating only briefly when Grantaire trips over the couch, and Eponine throws her arms up in the air and howls with laughter.

"Shh, shh!" she commands, her eyes on fire, her arms reaching out wide as if she is waiting to catch something intense about to crash into her. "This is it—this is it—THE FIRST OF DECEMBER WAS COVERED WITH SNOOWWWW!"

"You better fucking believe it!" Grantaire exclaims, and only then does Enjolras see the six empty beer cans on the table.

He means to announce his presence, but for what? He is not welcome here. Grantaire grabs her tiny waist and pushes her up into the air, spinning her – there is no motive to it, no tension, just an innocent and visceral joy that he has not been capable of since childhood, if he was ever capable of it at all.

Their happiness is agitating. He feels an uncomfortable stiffness in his knees, an itch under his skin. He will never be like them. He will never be carefree and jubilant, will never be so unselfconscious and removed from the here and now.

Her voice is every bit as tuneful as a strangled cat's: "—ten miles behiiiind me, and ten thousand more to gooooo whooaaoo oooo—"

He plows right through the living room to get to his bedroom. Neither of them notice, not even when he slams the door behind him.

* * *

Courfeyrac decides to throw a little get-together during finals week, the first Friday of December. Combeferre doesn't put a stop to it, so Enjolras can't find the heart to, either. Besides, most of his finals will happen in the spring. For once has relatively little to worry about.

The preparations start simple: Courfeyrac says to get plenty of booze and order pizza and they'll be set. But Eponine worms her way in and starts hanging Christmas lights (how she gets in without a key in the middle of the day, Enjolras is a little too wary to ask), and then Jehan starts baking _pie_, and the nail is really in the coffin once Bahorel accidentally makes the Facebook invite public and everyone and their uncle hits "attending." This is no longer a get-together, but a full-fledged party. And considering that half of the people in their group of friends are undergraduates, Enjolras doesn't even want to imagine what kind of crowd that they're about to endure.

Eponine is helping Jehan roll out piecrusts when Enjolras returns from the library. She sees him and her eyes light up with such unabashed delight that for a moment he is stunned, wondering what he ever could have done to deserve it. She drops the pie crust and bounds up to him, her usual messy, incongruous self: he sees that she has put some effort into tonight, that her lashes are dark and curled, that her lips are a bright cherry red, but her red party dress and her cheeks are already blemished with flour and there is a rip up her stockings in the back that he doubts she has seen.

She reaches up and grabs the collar of his button-up shirt. He doesn't realize how short she is until she is this close, so close that she has to tilt her head all the way up to look at him, so close that he smells cigarette smoke and whatever shampoo she uses in her hair.

"You're coming to the party, right?"

He finds himself smirking. Her boldness makes him bold. "I don't really have a choice in the matter, do I?"

He sees Jehan look up and watch them out of the corner of his eye. Eponine's fingers are still clutching his shirt collar.

"Good," she says, and then she gets on her tiptoes and stage-whispers in that gruff, intolerable voice of hers: "Because I told Cosette you'd be here."

His chest feels tight. "Oh," he manages.

She takes a step back from him, her expression gleeful. She is a skinny little imp, all teasing and tricks. She expects him to be impressed.

"Good," he says gruffly. "She seems nice."

Eponine laughs her throaty little laugh and flits back over to Jehan, nudging him and prattling on about whatever they were discussing before Enjolras walked in. Enjolras pushes past them into his room, where he lays flat on the bed and stares at the ceiling. He is only intending to take a short rest but he wakes up sometime later, and by then the party is just starting to set its pace: there are at least forty people crammed into their apartment now, getting steadily tipsier. The apartment smells of freshly-baked pie and peppermint schnapps and bacon. Sure enough, Bossuet is good-naturedly standing at the stove and frying some in front of a line of hungry-looking drunks.

He is not surprised that he recognizes hardly anyone. He scans the crowd, not looking for anyone in particular, when a hand claps him on the back.

"Finally joining in the fun?" Marius asks him amiably.

Enjolras can tell that the kid is already buzzed. He is all fidgety, cracking his knuckles and pushing his curls out of his face, his grin a little too manic.

"I was going to grab something to eat," says Enjolras, resisting the urge to rub the sleep out of his eyes.

"Have a drink!" Marius urges him. "Make some friends. Stay awhile."

"It's too loud in here to have a civil conversation," Enjolras grumbles, pushing his way into the kitchen.

Marius follows close behind: "What?"

Some drunk underclassman stumbles and sloshes beer onto Enjolras's bare foot. He grits his teeth and presses onward. "I said, it's too loud in here to—"

"Enjolras!"

It's Eponine, bursting from the crowd, pulling Cosette behind her with an overenthusiastic force. Cosette stumbles prettily in her high heels, snagging the carpet and pitching forward. It is clear that she is capable of righting herself, but before she can Marius dashes forward and grips her by the elbows, stopping her motion. She presses up against him by her forearms, and in an instant their eyes are level and staring.

"Cosette, you remember Enjolras," Eponine prods, reaching for him.

Cosette and Marius are still staring at each other. The intensity and length of it is uncomfortable. Eponine's obliviousness makes it more uncomfortable still.

"Cosette," she tries again, tapping the other girl's arm.

They might as well be ghosts, for all the attention Marius and Cosette are willing to spare them. "Cosette," Marius repeats, in this dumbfounded, breathy voice that Enjolras has never heard him use before.

"I'm so sorry, please excuse me, I'm so sorry," Cosette blurts, ducking her chin into her chest self-consciously.

"Not at all—don't be," Marius stammers. He is gaping at her like a fish, drinking her in. She is both stunning and understated, in a simple and modestly cut shimmering ivory dress that exposes her bare shoulders.

Next to her Eponine is messy and hunched over, looking younger than she should, the curls she must have tried to style already tangled and undone.

"I'm Marius," he says, and it is clear in that moment that he is infatuated, clear even to Enjolras, who hardly takes notice of anything like this if he can avoid it.

"Yeah," says Eponine, and only now does she start to look a little uneasy, the sloppy grin on her face faltering. "Cosette, this is my—this is Marius."

"Eponine's talked so much about you," says Cosette, never tearing her eyes away from Marius. The two of them grin shyly at each other, and Marius finally thinks to extend his hand to shake. Cosette's laugh sounds like a chiming bell. "I feel like I already know you."

"The feeling's mutual," says Marius, sounding ridiculous, like a caricature of himself. Cosette either doesn't notice or doesn't mind. He recovers his wits slightly and says, "Can I get you a drink?"

"Oh," Cosette hesitates. She puts a hand to her mouth and says, "I don't—I don't drink, I'm underage."

Enjolras has heard Marius claim no less than twenty times that people who don't drink in college are squares, but his eyes widen and he clutches a hand to his chest as if he just cannot handle the innocence of her. "Of course not, of course you don't, I'm—I thought you were older, forgive me."

Cosette leans in. "It's kind of hard to hear you," she says. Her long tresses spill over her shoulders, a striking contrast to her pale skin. "Do you maybe want to go out on the porch?"

He nods like a guppy and she takes his hand with the grace and confidence of someone who has never needed anyone to tell her she is beautiful. Enjolras understands her appeal. It is refreshing and uncomplicated, to see a girl her age handle herself with such ease.

Eponine is staring at their backs. The smile on her face is like rubber, wobbling and uncertain. Her eyes are too wide, searching the crowd and then briefly dropping to the floor. Then she seems to remember that Enjolras is still standing there. She looks up at him, watered-down and frizzy-haired and small.

"So much for that," she says, with a gesture that doesn't make it past her elbows. She reaches up and swipes at her nose with her forearm roughly, then looks around, suddenly antsy, obviously itching for an excuse to move.

He wishes he had something to say to her. He wishes they had even an inch of common ground. He wishes this without knowing why, except that he doesn't want her to go yet.

She hugs her arms to her chest and pulls her sweater over her party dress, her expression getting further and further away as he stands here like a statue. Her chin starts to quiver and then she clamps her jaw shut, waits a beat and says, "I'm going to go get a drink."

"C'mon," he says, trying to sound light-hearted, trying to sound like the rest of the guys. The people she is actually friends with. He knows it's forward but he is remembering the way she scuttled up to him and grabbed his collar and everyone here is so drunk and brave that it is contagious, so he reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder. His thumb grazes her collarbone, skinny like a bird. "We could go join the card game, or help Bossuet in the kitchen, or we could just—"

She jerks away from him, out of his grasp, her brows gnarled into a scowl. "I'm not some precious flower," she says. "Don't patronize me."

Enjolras didn't mean to condescend her, was only trying to veer her away from the alcohol. Now he's gone and upset her and he can't fathom how fast he has done it.

"I'm sorry," she says, deflating in an instant. She reaches out and grabs the hand she just jerked away from, and squeezes it so tenderly that for a moment she could be beautiful. The harshness in her face doesn't soften, but slackens. She is giving up. "I'll see you around."

It is a ridiculous thought, but he suddenly has an urge—not even an urge, just an image in his mind's eye—he steps forward, he grabs her shoulders and pulls her toward him. Her eyes are wide and her face comes back to life and she stands on her toes to meet him, and as they grow closer her eyelids slide shut, happily, dreamily—

Instead she walks away, back into the throng of drunk students. Enjolras stays for another hour to humor Courfeyrac. He sees Eponine one more time that night, steadily drinking in the corner with Jehan and Grantaire. He turns in before everyone has left and tries to sleep but there is too much ruckus and too many unbidden thoughts drifting in and out of his head. Sometime around three in the morning he peels off his sheets and decides to go into the kitchen for a glass of water.

The apartment is a wreck. He knows for a fact he and Combeferre will be the ones to clean it up in the morning. He leans down to pick up a particularly dangerously placed beer bottle from the floor, and something in the kitchen creaks. He is not alone.

"Pontmercy?"

Marius is standing in the glow of the oven light, looking dazed and even slightly mad. "You're up," he says, whispering. "Sorry if I woke you."

Enjolras shakes his head. He isn't really in the mood to talk.

"I think I'm in love."

Enjolras grabs the last clean glass from the cupboard and shoves it under the sink.

"I know that sounds crazy. I've only just met her. But it feels so—so _different_ with her, you know what I mean?"

His eyes are like moons. Enjolras tries not to grimace, and takes a long drink from his glass. The truth is, he has no idea what Marius means. And Marius must know that. It's a running joke with the lot of them. Enjolras is unaffected. Untouchable. Inhuman.

He doesn't normally care. But right now he is thinking of the disappointment in Eponine's posture, of the one deep dimple in her cheek when she laughs, of the wistful way she stared after Cosette and said called her beautiful with the resignation of a person who has nothing to lose. He is thinking of her, and for the first time, he is upset at their assumptions of him. He is capable of want. He is capable of desire.

He can't decide if it's for his own sake or for Eponine's that he looks at Marius indifferently and shuts him down with a terse, "No."

* * *

Guys! Thank you so much to the people who reviewed and followed, it really means a lot, especially being new to this particular pairing. I love hearing what people think! It's always inspiring to keep chugging at it when I hear back from readers :).

In the meantime I'm breaking out my trusty pair of fatpants. HAPPY THANKSGIVING, Y'ALL.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: I do not own any rights to Les Miserables or any of the characters.

* * *

Embers

The apartment is too crowded. Courfeyrac has always been notorious for ushering beautiful girls in and out of the apartment, but on top of that Combeferre's cousin is sleeping on the couch indefinitely, and in the days immediately following the holiday party Cosette all but moves in. And even when she isn't there, it feels like she is filling the space up with Marius's constant chattering on about her.

Enjolras doesn't mind any of them individually. But the sheer number of roommates and the fact that Grantaire is a down and out slob is just too overwhelming for him to get any work done in peace. When Feuilly expresses interest in moving closer to grounds Enjolras readily offers to sublet him his room for the next semester, and goes out in search of an apartment of his own.

He announces it bluntly during one of the rare instances that everyone is in the apartment together. They're all watching something on Netflix, eight of them spilling over on the couch and the chair: Combeferre and his cousin are squished against Courfeyrac, whose flavor of the week is sitting in his lap. Marius and Cosette are looking quite content to be sharing the tiny chair, although their balance seems precarious at best. Grantaire and Eponine are half-laying on the floor, propped up by the table, drawing letters into the carpet with their fingers.

"I'm moving out next semester. Feuilly's taking the room."

For a moment there is silence. Enjolras hadn't anticipated it feeling this awkward.

"Shit," says Courfeyrac.

Combeferre is frowning thoughtfully. "Where are you going?" he asks.

"Nowhere. I'm just—I'm getting my own apartment."

Everyone looks at him and then at each other uncomfortably. Only Eponine continues tracing circles on the floor.

Marius is the only one either obtuse or innocent enough to ask, "Why?"

Enjolras shrugs and immediately wishes he hadn't. He is not a shrugger. He straightens his posture and tries to ignore the heat of the other boys' eyes on him. "I can live closer to the law school. Focus more on my studies."

Grantaire scoffs. "He's too good for us. As usual."

Before Enjolras can snap at him, Combeferre cuts in, his voice level and firm. "Lay off him," he says, not harshly. "It makes sense. He has more reading to do than all of us combined."

"Whatever," Grantaire mutters.

"Don't think you can weedle your way out of hanging out with us," says Courfeyrac, trying to lighten the mood.

Enjolras offers him a tight smile. "I won't be far."

"The movie's only just started. Come sit down for awhile," says Cosette, and maybe it's because she is so agreeable, or maybe because she is the one who knows him the least, but her gesture is the one that finally diffuses the tension in the room.

Enjolras lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. He has a mountain of reading to finish, a research paper to draft, and an inbox full of e-mails from his study group demanding his input to prepare for tomorrow's line of questioning in Torts. But he has never taken a moment to enjoy sharing this apartment with his friends. He can sacrifice one night.

He takes a step forward, relenting, but then he hesitates. There is no room for him.

"Here."

Eponine presses herself up against Grantaire to make space between herself and the wall. Grantaire grudgingly moves to accommodate her.

Enjolras barely fits. The entire length of their arms push against each other. "Thanks," he says anyway, and if he isn't mistaken, she leans against him a little closer than she has to.

A few minutes later Grantaire eases up and hands him one of the beers. The movie is terrible. It's some blithering, raunchy comedy, but it's kind of mind-numbing, so Enjolras doesn't really mind. The further they get into the movie the more Eponine's limbs start to sprawl, until half a leg is on Graintaire's and her head is resting against Enjolras's shoulder.

He feels a strange sense of responsibility in the weight of her head there, in the tickle of her hair against his neck. She trusts him. He understands that this is not remarkable, because even in knowing as little about her as he does, he understands that her trust in people is perhaps the sweetest and most dangerous thing about her.

Toward the end of the movie everyone laughs at a particularly bawdy scene. Eponine is silent, and for a moment he thinks she has fallen asleep. He shifts just slightly to check, and that's when he sees that her eyes are far from shut, but staring intently across the room.

He follows her gaze to Marius, who is whispering something in Cosette's ear. She smiles and nods in acknowledgement, and then tenderly brushes a stray curl off of his forehead.

Eponine's expression betrays no emotion, but the seconds tick by and she stares and stares and stares and nobody notices, nobody else sees.

The movie ends, and everyone bids each other good night. The boys all disperse to their rooms, Combeferre's cousin settles in on the couch, and Cosette offers to drive Eponine home. Eponine does not protest this time, but lingers to tell Marius good-bye. He ruffles her hair and tells her to stay out of trouble and Enjolras shuts the door to his room before he can see the wilting expression on her face.

* * *

He should have known Combeferre wouldn't let him off the hook so easily. Enjolras boards the bus home later that week and sees Combeferre sitting in the back, and ordinarily he wouldn't bother to sit next to him but Combeferre waves him over. As soon as he sits Combeferre starts wipes his palms on his pant legs and straightening his posture, which is how Enjolras knows he is about to get an earful.

"I respect your decision to move out," says Combeferre, in that even-tempered way he always does.

"But," Enjolras says for him, trying not to reveal how exasperated he already is.

Combeferre smiles amicably. "But," he says, nodding. "I just wonder – if you really thought about it. Living alone, I mean."

Enjolras takes a moment to answer, because he doesn't want to insult Combeferre with how ready he is to confirm just that. "I've thought about it. It's what's best for my studies."

Combeferre nods, but Enjolras can tell he isn't through. It is in his nature to first relent and then respectfully disagree. Enjolras supposes it is to spare people's feelings, but Enjolras doesn't have many feelings to spare.

"But do you really think that's what's best for you?" he implores.

Enjolras almost laughs – this conversation is the natural progression of Combeferre's undergraduate minor in psychology – but thinks the better of it.

"I'll be fine."

Combeferre purses his lips, and after a moment he nods. "Well," he says. "You know you're always welcome back. We'll just make another copy of the key for Feuilly."

Enjolras is strangely touched by this gesture. "Thanks," he says, staring at the empty seat in front of him. Combeferre seems satisfied enough by the end result of their talk, and lets it go. They settle into a comfortable silence, until the bus rolls to a stop and Combeferre points out the window: "Is that Eponine?"

Enjolras leans to look out the window and sure enough, there she is. She's sitting on a picnic table at the little park with the playground and next to her is a lanky boy with a mop of light brown hair and worn out sneakers that seem astronomically too large for the rest of his skinny body. Between the two of them is a large textbook and a notebook that Eponine is scrawling something into, and then handing over for the boy to see.

"I forgot she has a brother," says Combeferre thoughtfully.

The bus picks up again and as it turns Enjolras finally sees her face from this angle. Her brow is puckered thoughtfully, her gestures patient and calm, unlike the unpredictable whirlwind of a girl he has become accustomed to seeing.

The bus rounds the corner and Eponine and the boy are out of sight.

"She should be in school," says Enjolras. His grip is tight around his backpack strap, and he realizes all of his muscles are tight, as if he were about to leap up from his seat.

Combeferre nods his agreement. "She's actually a bright girl."

Enjolras purses his lips and doesn't answer, unsure how he can respond without giving away the strange resentment he feels toward Combeferre for assuming that of the two of them he knows Eponine best – and then acknowledging that, for all intents and purposes, he probably does.

* * *

Enjolras finds himself a new apartment closer to the law school, with a quiet little community made up mostly of families and other graduate students. The bedroom window looks out to an idyllic little park with benches that he imagines himself studying on, and faces to the east so that the sunlight streams through the blinds in the morning. The kitchen and living area are comfortably small, and there is even a small half-room that Courfeyrac gleefully pegs as the "crash room" for any of their friends who get drunk nearby and don't make it all the way home.

The day he takes the bus over to sign the lease he decides that he'll turn it into a study. He can buy a simple desk and chair cheaply enough at the student center, and the small space will help him to concentrate. He's found that lately he is able to less and less.

In early December his friend Jacques asks him to join the hunger strike he is organizing for better wages for the university workers. Enjolras throws himself into helping with the preparations, grateful to have a task at hand, something that demands his attention away from the old apartment he hasn't yet left. He leaves early in the morning to meet with his study group, spends the day in his classes, and doesn't return home most nights until long after midnight, outlasting even Grantaire. Two weeks go by in a satisfying blur, until the day that marks the end of the semester - the day that the hunger strike begins.

It's around six o'clock that night that the ten of them all start to feel the gnawing hunger in their guts. The other students are running around the campus with their bagels and pizza slices and smoothies from the dining halls and Enjolras has never resented his stomach more for the audibly loud groan that escapes nobody's notice. Students mill by and pay them virtually no attention, their eyes vacantly staring at their signs with glazed expressions, blatant in their disinterest in the cause.

As the night falls Enjolras feels a frustration much more demanding than his hunger. He didn't have high expectations for the amount of impact their little demonstration would have, but he certainly thought they'd be more effective than this. As everyone burrows into their down coats and one of the undergraduates makes up some excuse to leave, Jacques offers Enjolras a bitter shrug.

By the time Eponine ambles up to him, Enjolras's blood is already boiling.

"What are you doing?" she asks, her nose bright red from the cold, her bare hands shoved into the pockets of her coat.

Enjolras purses his lips. "We have signs, you know," he says, because he has the feeling that her presence here has nothing to do with their cause.

She sits in the open lawn chair beside him, the one that the faint-hearted undergraduate just vacated. "I can read," she says. She makes herself comfortable, sinking into rickety frame and crossing one leg over the other. After she speaks her breath leaves a cold, hovering fog that disappears as soon as it forms: "But what are you _doing?_"

The others are listening in now. He feels his jaw tightening. What is she doing running around campus this time of night? She isn't even a student.

"We're trying to get the board to pay the university workers more livable wages," he says evenly.

He doesn't have to look to know that her upper lip is curving on one side. She has the most peculiar way of smirking - any time he has ever known someone else to smirk they do it in triumph or in mockery, but Eponine always seems to move her face as if she isn't aware that anyone is watching. She smirks to herself, for some thought that she doesn't share.

"So you're starving yourself."

"It's a hunger strike," he says.

She is staring straight ahead, out in the grassy common area. The campus is practically empty. It's cold and the first round of finals starts tomorrow. Yet another hole in their strategy, Enjolras notes with some bitterness.

She's tapping her foot again. He thinks if she pulls out a cigarette right now he will surely crack. It's been forty-five days since he last lit up and he has not in any moment felt weaker than this.

"And this helps the university workers … how?" she asks.

Enjolras tugs his scarf tighter around his neck, actively trying not to shiver. "It draws attention to the problem," he says, his spit acrid in his mouth. "We're causing a stir. People will notice."

At that precise moment the first smattering of raindrops start to fall from the sky. Everyone else scrambles for their umbrellas, but Eponine doesn't move, and Enjolras can't bring himself to either.

"Two problems don't make a solution, monsieur," she says simply.

She still isn't looking at him. He knows she doesn't mean it as an insult to him, but he cannot help but feel the weight of her words as if they are. This isn't even his rally, but he feels as though he has failed it just the same. And here is Eponine, her wily, know-nothing nineteen-year-old self, who comes to drive the last nail into the coffin with a few simple words.

He isn't giving up yet. He won't. He will see this to the end, if he has to outlast every one of these students.

"What do you suggest we do, then?" he asks.

Eponine shrugs. If she has noticed his irritation with her then she makes no attempt to acknowledge it. "It's like I told you," she said. "Things just are the way they are."

"If you believed that, you wouldn't be sitting out here with us," Enjolras points out, raising his voice to compensate for the sound of the rain coming down. She's about to say something in her own defense, and Enjolras feels a surge of frustration for this day, for the gnawing hunger that he can't ignore, for the innocent way she names all of his disappointments and failings, and so he cuts her off and says, "If you believed that, you wouldn't still be hanging around our apartment all the time."

This gets her attention. She finally looks at him, her brown eyes wide with surprise and wariness. "What is that supposed to mean?" she asks, wiping a soaked strand of hair off of her forehead, spluttering slightly from the rain.

He is not this petty. "Pontmercy has a girlfriend," he says anyway, his lip drawing a thin line.

The hurt on her face is not the least bit satisfying. She has no shame in it, no sense of self, just staring at him as if he has thrown her off ship and is watching her drown. He hates himself for it. There is nothing, it seems, that is too precious for him to destroy.

But she is not defenseless. "Enjoy living alone," she says, her voice surprisingly light. She hoists her soaking wet shoulder bag up from the cement and leaves so abruptly that none of the other students even notice her scrawny form shooting around the corner and disappearing into the dark.

The night wears on and the more Enjolras tries to take his mind off of the exchange the more miserable he feels. He continues to hold their banners, continues to call out to the few passerby and continues to endure the swelling, unfamiliar hunger in his gut, but all the while her words are rattling between his ears: _Two problems don't make a solution, monsieur._

It seems he is only capable of causing problems anywhere he goes.

* * *

The hunger strike fails. On the morning of day three Jacques finally throws in the towel, and after a few hours of standing alone and painfully awkward in the square, Enjolras reluctantly leaves as well. Eponine was right. The whole charade was pointless. Nothing has changed.

But he will not let himself be discouraged. He will learn from this mistake, he decides, and the next time he tries to make a change, he will do it the right way. It will be carefully planned and decidedly effective and nothing like this haphazard group of uncommitted students that Jacques threw together. He has felt the burning shame of this once, and he will not feel it again.

A few days later his room is nearly packed. All of his clothes are in suitcases, his textbooks in a box, what little furniture he has pushed up against the wall. He's borrowing Bahorel's SUV tomorrow and carting it all a mile away. That night he feels edgy, almost anxious in anticipation of it. As eager as he has been to leave, there has always been a part of him that is resistant to change. Ever since childhood he has been set in his ways; his mother called it stubborn and his father called it bullheadedness, both with some affection, but Enjolras has come to understand - and resent - that the root of it is his own fear.

Late that night he leaves his room and decides to walk around the neighborhood. The wind bites like ice at his cheeks and is a welcome distraction. By the time he returns home an hour later, his fingers and toes are mostly numb, but he feels slightly more at ease.

As he walks into the threshold he sees a shadow cross the hallway. The sound of footfalls is barely audible. He knows at once that they don't belong to any of the boys.

He feels his shoulders tense in anticipation as he walks into the kitchen. It occurs to him that maybe he should arm himself in some way - there's a knife in the drawer, and an umbrella at his feet. But he keeps walking, straining his ears, hearing nothing but the thrum of the heating unit and his heart beating in his throat.

He rounds the corner into the living room fast and hears a stifled gasp.

"_Shit_," he hisses, every bit as alarmed as the small girl pressed against the wall.

It takes his eyes a second to adjust to the darkness but sure enough Eponine is standing in their living room, her hair soaking wet, her body wrapped in nothing but an oversized towel. She clutches it tighter against herself, and even as he tears his eyes away all he is seeing is skinny knees and shoulders and elbows, pale and exposed from the streetlamp outside the window.

"What are you _doing _here?" he whispers, his voice harsh, his eyes intentionally staring anywhere but her.

She doesn't move a muscle. "Marius said I could," she defends herself.

"Could _what?_"

"Shower here. Stay the night, I guess. I'll be gone before you leave, don't you worry," she says, turning her back on him. The towel slips just slightly enough for him to see the sharp plane of her shoulder blade.

For a moment all Enjolras can manage is to balk at her.

"I didn't know you were awake," she says.

So she has been avoiding him. Now that the shock of discovering her has somewhat worn off he is remembering their last encounter in full force. He takes a step back from her. He should apologize.

"Why aren't you at home?" he asks instead.

Her cheeks are still shining and red from scrubbing her face dry. She turns just slightly, her body sideways to him. "I moved out. To live with Musichetta. But her sister came back early from studying abroad, so." She puckers her lips into an wary line and stands there. By the time it occurs to Enjolras that she is probably waiting for him to leave, she has already moved toward the couch and grabbed a pile of clothes. "Turn around," she says.

He obeys. His face burns. "So are you moving back in with your … you're living with your parents, right?"

"No."

He hears the sound of rustling fabric, of skin on skin. She is naked behind him. He is suddenly certain of it, an unbidden an image of her bare in the dark bursts into his mind.

"So where will you go?" he says, trying to make conversation, wishing he could take back the last one.

It takes a moment for her to answer. "You can turn around now. If you want."

Even though she has given him the clear he feels some stifled embarrassment at turning to face her. She is clad in an oversized shirt he is almost certain belongs to one of the boys, and a pair of big flannel pajama pants. Her arms are up over her head, pulling her damp locks into a makeshift ponytail and then dropping it.

She is deliberately not answering the question, but he gleans it in the silence. She has nowhere to go. And against every voice of reason in his head screaming not to, he hears himself blurt out the words, "I have a spare room."

She laughs, one breathy little note escaping her lips. "Yeah?" she says. She is combing her hair now, not taking him seriously. He watches her rip through it with the bristles carelessly until it hangs wet and straight at her shoulders.

"It's not really a room. It's half a room," he says. The living room suddenly feels like a vacuum, like his words have crushed all of the air out of it. He doesn't want a roommate. But he is suddenly afraid that she is going to say no. "It's not much. If you want it."

She scoffs. "I'm not some charity case."

"Of course not. You'd pay rent."

For the first time since the hunger strike she smiles at him, smiles so wide that he can see the tops of her two crooked bottom teeth. "You're kidding."

He isn't. "I'm not."

"You want to live with a nineteen-year-old college dropout with an arrest record?"

He allows himself a smirk. It is a relief to hear her rib him again. "So it isn't ideal."

She walks over to Marius's room and rests her hand on the doorknob. Enjolras already knows he is spending the night at Cosette's, but she still stares at him with a challenge in her eyes, daring him to comment. When he doesn't she says, "That's all very nice, Enjolras, but ask me again in the morning. The dark makes people say things they don't mean."

The door shuts behind her.

He already knows he won't change his mind. He slips back into his room, his frozen toes thawed, his heart pounding too fast, and he decides right then that he will never lie to Eponine. He will not be one more person who lies to her in the dark.

* * *

Oh gosh you guys thank you for all the follows. Sorry it's been so long since the last update, life has been crazy and great. Let me know what you're thinking, I do appreciate it!


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: I do not own any rights to Les Miserables or any of the characters.

* * *

Embers

As promised, the next morning Eponine is gone before he wakes up. He hovers beside Marius's door, which she left slightly ajar. She has already changed the sheets and left the used ones in the hamper. The sun has barely risen and he wonders where on earth she has gone on this cold December day.

Bahorel shows up and he and Combeferre help Enjolras load up all of his things. Courfeyrac sleeps through the farewell and Grantaire watches unhelpfully from the couch and says "Good riddance!" with the same lopsided, ironic grin that he has had since they were children. It seems that he is at least partially forgiven.

He arranges his furniture and hangs his clothes in his new closet and assigns drawers to all of his kitchenware and soon enough the day is almost out. Around dinnertime he heads to the grocery store, and without thinking he walks the long way, past the park where he saw Eponine and her little brother the other day. It's empty now, too dark and too chilly to sustain anyone.

It occurs to him that he has no idea how to find her. He knows her parents live in the same complex that Marius was grateful to leave, but if she's not living there then he has no idea where to begin, beyond searching every corner bar in the city for an underage bartender. He isn't even sure what it matters. She didn't take him seriously. He could tell by the tilt of her head, by the boldness of her words. Maybe she has never taken him seriously.

As the night starts to fall he pulls out his phone and calls Marius.

"Enjolras?" Marius picks up on the first ring. "Is everything alright?"

At first Enjolras frowns at the distress in the other boy's voice, but it occurs to him that he so rarely is the one to reach out. No wonder Marius is alarmed. "Yes," he says evenly.

"Oh. Well. What's up? How are you?"

Enjolras clears his throat. "I was wondering if you have Eponine's number," he says, wincing. He has never been the best with pleasantries.

"Yeah, of course. Hold on. I'll text it to you."

He hears shuffling, and the sound of hushed voices. Cosette, he figures. The two of them are inseparable. Enjolras cannot imagine enduring another person's company for that long.

"Alright, I sent it," says Marius after a moment. "What do you need it for? Isn't she at the Corner Bar?"

"Is that where she works?"

"Yeah. What's going on?" Marius presses.

In the few beats of silence Marius waits for an answer, all Enjolras can imagine is that vacant expression on Eponine's face while she watches him, like she is capable of imagining a thousand could-bes and should-bes and might-have-beens. He should just tell Marius the truth - that he is offering to let Eponine take the extra half-room in his apartment - but he doesn't want to, and he isn't even quite sure why.

"I just have a question for her," says Enjolras.

Marius's voice sounds skeptical. "Alright. Have a good night, then."

Enjolras hangs up the phone, and pulls his jacket back on over his shirt. The Corner Bar is a few blocks away, and she probably can't text at work anyway. He walks back out into the chill. It's a clear and crisp kind of night, where the stars are bright and the cold is sharp on his skin and everything feels punctuated, demanding attention that he cannot spare. It's a ten o'clock on a Tuesday night. Unsurprisingly the place is nearly empty.

He is only sitting at the bar for a minute or so when she finally emerges from the back with a stack of clean glasses.

"Sorry sir, how can I - oh," she says, her tone changing in an instant when she recognizes him. Her wild hair is tied back, barely tamed into a thick yellow ponytail, cowlicks and curls loose at the crown of her head. She wears an all-black uniform with a dark green apron and it's the first time she has ever looked ordinary to him. Then she cocks her hip and puts a hand on it and she is all Eponine again.

"What can I do for you, Enjolras?" she asks. "Something on tap? Something a little stronger, maybe?"

He raises his eyebrows at her. "You left before we could talk this morning."

She turns her attention to a supply form and starts scribbling numbers on it. "I thought I was sparing you," she says.

"You thought I would change my mind."

She turns her back on him now, to the tap, and pours from a label he doesn't recognize. The black shirt is tight in places of her that are unfamiliar to him. There are the slightest curves in her skinny frame that her usual loose, skimming clothes would not let him suspect. He stares while she pours, and as soon as she turns his eyes flit back to the bar.

"Here," she says, setting the beer in front of him. Her expression is forgiving. She is anticipating an apology. "It's on the house."

He doesn't drink much, but he takes an obliging sip. The beer is particularly hoppy and feels bitter in the back of his throat.

"There would be rules, of course," he says.

She raises an eyebrow at him, just one, the delicate curve of it shooting past the loose curls spilling out of her ponytail. "Rules, huh?" she asks, attending to the dishes, still not quite conceding that he is serious about this.

He can tell, though, in the way that her face is tilted toward his, in the way that she makes as little noise as possible straightening her dishes, that she is straining to hear him. He has her attention, for however long he is able to hold it.

"I don't like company."

Eponine purses her lips. "All my friends are at the old apartment anyway."

"I don't like noise."

Eponine smirks. "It took you six months to even figure out I was hanging out in your apartment, I think we're good on the noise front."

Enjolras finds himself smirking back, pleased with the rhythm of the conversation, with how easy it is to talk with her. He takes another sip of beer, emboldened. It doesn't taste nearly as bitter as it did on the first swallow. She is staring at him, waiting for further stipulations.

He shrugs. "That's all."

"Rent?" she asks.

He already worked it out based on the size of the room. "Three fifty. Due on the first of every month."

She doesn't take very long to consider this, offering him one thoughtful nod. She finishes stacking a tray full of dirty dishes, and then looks at him and says, "I can make rules too, then?"

"I don't see why not."

She looks him dead in the eyes. Eponine has certainly looked at him before, but he doubts it was ever with an intensity like this. She is, for once, completely focused on him, her thoughts not straying anywhere else. She holds up a dirty fork and points it in his general direction.

"No funny business," she says.

It takes him a moment to understand what she means by that, and then his face is on fire. "Of course not," he says. He is too thrown off by the insinuation to say anything more. He would be insulted, but the memory of staring at the curves of her back in the ten seconds prior is too fresh in his mind. Still, he knows himself. He is not extending this offer with any suggestive notions in mind.

She smirks in that way of hers that makes him wonder if she was making the rule as a joke. He has the vague feeling he may have just been mocked.

He takes another swig of the beer, because her eyes on him feel heavier than anyone else's. His chest feels warm and his head feels clear.

"So?" he asks.

She swivels and shuts the mini fridge door closed with her hip. "I don't get to see the place first?"

"Right. Hand me your phone."

She keeps an eye on the kitchen door, and then slips her phone out of her apron pocket. Enjolras types in the address, and then for good measure puts his number into her contacts. Another customer ambles up to the bar and starts to order and Eponine turns away, her voice at once unremarkable and her posture plain.

He leaves the phone on the counter next to her pad and leaves the bar, before she makes any rules that he will break.

* * *

A little after midnight she rolls up in the passenger seat of a dingy pick-up truck. The skinny fellow, Montparnasse, is scowling behind the wheel. Enjolras peers back at him in the darkness and then Eponine is bounding up the front walk with two suitcases and an air mattress tucked under one arm.

He extends his hand to help her but she grips her load tighter and tilts her chin toward the car. "There's one more suitcase in the back," she says.

Montparnasse's eyes are glinting slits in the dark, cold and unyielding. Enjolras stares back at him, and it becomes clear that Montparnasse will not look away first, that there is some sort of challenge in his gaze. Enjolras keeps his expression neutral and refuses to take the bait, but nonetheless feels a familiar tension in his neck, remembering the night that they first met and his fingers crawling up the seams of Eponine's shirt.

In one swift motion he scoops up the last suitcase and turns his back on the car.

"Nice place you've got here."

Enjolras means to keep walking, but Montparnasse's voice hisses behind him in the darkness, too deliberate to be ignored: "You know as well as I do that a girl like 'Ponine doesn't belong here."

The front door shuts behind Eponine as she ventures into the apartment.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Enjolras asks.

Montparnasse's thin, delicate face erupts into a snarl. "You know exactly what it means, rich boy."

Enjolras doesn't react. He is not unused to these kinds of interactions. He spent most afternoons in his childhood getting called at across the street by neighborhood boys making fun of his private school uniform, and most of college resented by students who were paying for their own educations. He is lucky, it is true, so he does not let a comment like this bother him – but his lack of a reaction only seems to goad Montparnasse more.

"Look," says Montparnasse. His head lowers into his chest and his voice is chilling, a lock of thick black hair casting shadows over his face. "I don't know what kind of sick, twisted fucker you are, but whatever your _game_ is with 'Ponine—"

"Excuse me?"

Montparnasse scoffs, almost triumphantly. "Please. You're going to what – save her? Pluck her off the streets like prince fucking charming and then what, huh? Fuck her over, is what. I know your type, I know your crowd, and as soon as you're bored with this fucked up charade – "

"Parnasse!" Eponine exclaims.

The blood has drained from Enjolras's face.

She rushes up to the car window to scold him. "Leave him be," she says, and Montparnasse's jaw clenches shut, looking past Eponine to fix his eyes on Enjolras.

Eponine sighs. "Could you give us a minute?" she asks Enjolras.

Enjolras nods mutely and walks toward the apartment. His fingers are curled into fists at his side, his entire body tense, his blood hot and indignant. He sits down on the couch and stares at the black of the television screen as the minutes pass, too many of them, and he starts to think that she has left. That she will drive away with that _delinquent _and leave all of her things here, that she will tell all of their friends with a snicker how close she came to living with him and how readily she changed her mind, that she will come tomorrow in the hours of dawn and collect her suitcases and leave without a word, without a stir, and he won't even know until he wakes up and finds the room bare again.

When the doorknob twists open Enjolras shoots to his feet with such accidental violence that he knocks his shin into the table.

"Hi." Eponine's eyes are wide, her shoulders a little hunched, staring at him warily. She licks her lips, her back still hugging the door. "Sorry about him."

Enjolras shakes his head. "It's fine," he says curtly.

Neither of them moves. "He just doesn't know you, is all," she says, her voice still quiet.

_Neither do you_, Enjolras is thinking. It isn't the first time it has occurred to him how outlandish this situation is, how out of character. Every decision he has made leading up to now has been well thought out, carefully executed, planned. Eponine is none of those things and looking at her now, with the loose threads hanging off her sleeves and her work apron smudged with food, he knows she never will be.

Still – there is something in her words, an implication. She thinks that she knows him, then. Enjolras may not believe it – how can anyone know him, when there is so much, he thinks, so _much_ that he thinks about that he does not say – but he likes the idea that somebody knows him. That somebody considers him long enough to think that they might.

"Do you need help unpacking?" he asks.

She shakes her head. "I don't feel like unpacking yet," she says crossing the room. The couch squeaks and his weight shifts when she sits down beside him. She curls her knees up to her chest and rests her chin on them and says, quietly but not cautiously, "Why do you want to live with me, anyway?"

It's a question he's been asking himself all day.

"Why do you want to live with _me?_" he asks back.

The corner of her lip tugs upward. "Hmm. I asked you first."

The silence that follows is painfully awkward. He hears the floorboards creaking from the neighbors upstairs and the heater with its low moan and he blinks hard. He wants to know where she is. He wants her to be safe. He wants to understand her, with her wide eyes and her acceptance of people, with her heart that feels too much and her skin that has grown too thick. She is all opposing forces, wild and frightened, optimistic and callous, shameless and withdrawn.

Enjolras, on the other hand, just is. There is no great mystery to him. Only ambitions and years of carefully laid plans that seem to fall just short of them.

"I just …"

He doesn't even know how he's going to explain himself, but it ends up not mattering. He feels the tickle of her hair on his skin, the weight of her head on his shoulder. For once he is not tense. There is no expectation in her gesture, only tenderness and understanding.

"It's okay," she says. He can smell smoke from the bar in the tangles of her hair. "I had a good feeling about you, too."

* * *

Living with Eponine is like living with a shadow. A week goes by and he hardly ever sees her. The only evidence of her existence is the blonde hair in the shower drain and the kettle on the stove and the light that flickers under her door when he is wandering restlessly around the apartment at night. She goes to work and stays out late, and walks in so silently that he never detects her; by morning she is usually gone, and where she goes without a car he is not at all sure.

He means to warn her days before it happens, but he doesn't run into her until an hour or so before he leaves.

Her door creaks open, and Enjolras mutes the television. He's been waiting for her, truth be told. He'll never catch her for a second otherwise.

"I'm going home for Christmas," he announces.

"Oh?" she asks, scanning the living room. Her nametag is on the coffee table. She leans down to grab it, exposing a rip in her stocking on her upper thigh that her black shorts were hiding only a moment before. "When?"

"Today."

She stabs the sharp end of the nametag into her shirt, her tongue protruding from her mouth in concentration. "Where's home for you?"

"A few hours from here."

"You don't seem too excited."

He shrugs. "I'll be gone until the twenty-seventh. Just – you know. Lock the doors whenever you leave. Call me if you need anything."

She laughs that low and guttural laugh of hers. "I'll survive, I'm sure."

* * *

On Christmas Day he wakes up to one missed call from Eponine. There are no messages. He picks up and calls her, and it goes straight to voicemail.

He endures his father's effusiveness and his mother's vanity and his brother's quiet hostility four the next few days. His father has an important golf game with a client he is anxious will get snowed out. His mother is furiously dieting to fit into a charity gala dress on New Year's. His brother mentions that he has a new girlfriend, but their mother puckers her lips in distaste and Enjolras doesn't ask anything more.

When he arrives back at the apartment in the early hours of the morning the apartment door is locked.

He lets himself in. "Eponine?"

Nobody answers. "Eponine," he tries again, knocking on her door.

He checks his watch. It's six in the morning. Knowing that he is overstepping some unspoken boundary, he twists the doorknob to her room and nudges the door open just slightly with his foot to peer inside. There are a tangle of empty sheets on her air mattress in the corner, a few books strewn out on the floor and clothes crammed into a hanging organizer in her closet, but no Eponine.

She has a family. He is aware of that. But he also feels uneasy, knowing the lengths she has gone to avoid them, how she hardly ever mentions him at all.

He stands in her open doorway and debates whether it would be too intrusive to text her and ask where she is. Eventually he does, and feels a little foolish hitting send, sure that she is either with her family or with the boys at the old apartment. It's the holidays, after all. And she has an entire life outside of this apartment that he cannot even fathom.

Still, when he settles into his mattress to catch up on sleep, he shuts his eyes but he is listening, straining, waiting – for a text from her that doesn't come.

* * *

When a day passes and there is no sign of her he calls and leaves a message. He watches the news and brews too much coffee and walks to the Corner Bar, but there is another bartender working today, and Enjolras is too stricken to ask if he has seen Eponine or knows where she has been. He busies himself, stays out of the apartment for hours, expecting every time that he returns that she will be back in her room or sprawled out like a cat on the couch, but every time he returns her door is still slightly ajar and her things are untouched.

His phone rings and he leaps up from his desk chair to grab it. It's only Combeferre. Still, he picks up on the first ring.

"Hey."

"Hey," says Combeferre in his mild, happy way. "You're back, right? Do you want to come over for dinner? We're making tacos."

"Is Eponine there?"

Combeferre pauses. "Is Eponine here?" he asks, his voice muffled.

He can hear Grantaire bellow a "no" somewhere in the background.

"I haven't heard from her in days."

"Well that's Eponine for you," says Combeferre, with an affectionate familiarity that irks Enjolras.

"She hasn't been answering her phone."

Combeferre pauses for a moment, and Enjolras can hear rustling on his end. His voice is lower when he speaks again, as if he has detected an edge in Enjolras's voice that he didn't mean to have.

"What's going on? Why have you been calling Eponine?"

Enjolras grits his teeth. He hasn't told them, and apparently neither has she.

"She—" He clears his throat. There is absolutely no logical explanation for this. When he tells them he will seem like a fool. "She's living here."

"Wait—what?"

"She's my roommate," says Enjolras again, and instead of sounding nonchalant the words come out sticky and defensive and laced with misplaced guilt.

Even Combeferre cannot conceal the judgment in his tone. There are a few beats of silence, and then a steady, "I thought you wanted to live alone."

Enjolras doesn't have any patience for this. Feeling like a snapping twig, he shoots back, "Are you going to lecture me, or are you going to help me find her?"

He regrets his words as soon as they leave his mouth. He is blowing this out of proportion, making it something it is not. But he hears Combeferre give a weary sigh and relent.

"Eponine's just like this. She disappears sometimes. She always comes back."

Enjolras's grip tightens around the phone, his palms sweating. He is glad Combeferre is not in the room with him to see the deepening scowl on his face. How can he be so dismissive of her? How can he talk about her like she's the neighborhood stray? This isn't Eponine meandering in and out of their apartment; this is Eponine _not coming home_, and no matter who she is or what her track record is, Enjolras cannot believe that that's normal.

Combeferre must sense his unease in the silence. "Is something … _else_ going on?"

"Not that I know of," Enjolras admits.

"I mean—" He can imagine Combeferre hesitating, the way his lips pucker in concentration before he says something uncomfortable. "I mean, is there something going on between the two of _you_."

Enjolras grits his teeth. "Do you think I'm that stupid?" he asks. "I'm in law school. She's a _kid_."

"You can't blame me for asking."

No, he can't. But that doesn't him any less irritated by it.

"Are you coming to dinner, then?"

Enjolras stares at the front door, thinking about the moment he pressed the key to the apartment into Eponine's skinny fingers, of the proud and solemn way she handed him the first month's rent in cash and carefully put the key into her front pocket.

He shakes his head, tearing his eyes off the threshold. "No."

* * *

He sleeps fitfully and wakes up to a thick flurry of snow falling outside of the window. It's already sticking, at least an inch of white gleaming in the parking lot. It's a Saturday. Nobody's bothering to clear it off.

There are four new texts on his phone, three of which are from Courfeyrac. _WTF?! _says the first one, and then, _Seriously how long have you been shacking up with the kid?_ and then, to Enjolras's mortification: _I guess it makes sense, but shit, you could have told us. _

The next one is from Marius, who basically repeats what Combeferre has already assured him: that Eponine is a "free spirit" and that he used to worry too, but he's gotten used to her by now.

He deletes all of the texts and shrugs on a pair of jeans and his coat. He'll start shoveling the parking lot out, he decides. The semester is over and he has nothing better to do. Better to do it now before it accumulates, before it freezes overnight and slickens the road, before it hardens to into unyielding chunks and becomes impossible to move—

The doorknob clicks, and then twists open. He is standing there with the shovel when Eponine slips into the apartment, her back turned to him, her jacket and her hair littered white with fresh, melting snow.

She turns to face him and he cannot reconcile his fury and relief.

Her face is pale, her nose and her ears bright red. She looks sallow, even sickly, but when she sees him holding the shovel her eyes glint and her lips form a vague, crooked smile and she says, "Don't you need gloves?"

"Where have you been?"

She flinches, almost imperceptibly. His tone is severe. But she doesn't react any further than that, and even has the nerve to shrug at him.

"I texted you," he says. He is angry enough that his hands are shaking. He hates her for making him care, hates her for taking it for granted, for not understanding that he has spent his entire life not caring too much about anything to avoid moments just like this one. "I called you."

She curls her upper lip into her teeth. "My phone was dead."

He stands there for a moment, thinking she will yield. That she will apologize, or at least make some sort of reconciliatory gesture, some small acknowledgement for the worry and the ruckus she has unnecessarily caused. It is because of her he hasn't slept in two days, because of her that all their friends are surely making snide remarks about him, because of her that he is standing here feeling further from himself than he has ever been.

"You're thoughtless," he accuses her.

She scowls. "Why are you angry?"

"I had _no idea_ where you were."

"What does that matter?" she asks, finally moving from the door, closing the distance between them. There are dark circles under her eyes, exaggerating the wideness of them, making her look feral. "What do you care?"

"I don't," he stammers. "I _don't_."

She is closer to him now, jutting her pointy chin up to face him. "Good," she practically spits at him.

It's over. It should be over. But she is still making that _face _at him, fiery and indignant and intolerable. He practically growls in frustration, tearing his face away from hers, unable to believe the anger itching under his skin. "It's common courtesy," he says, crossing the room to get away from her, from her big eyes and her furrowed brow and the challenge in the grim line of her mouth. "It's just – it's what people _do_ when they live together, they say something, or they leave a note, or they answer a damn _call_—"

"You left!" Eponine interrupts, and he is surprised by the volume of it, by the crack in her voice. It echoes through the walls of the apartment and even she seems stunned by it. She takes a step back, looking a little less certain. "You left, and that's fine, so I just – I didn't know you came back, it doesn't matter."

She has looked young to him before, but as she stands there, her arms half-crossed over her chest, shifting her weight like her body can't decide how to hold itself together, she looks younger than ever. She is defensive, regarding him out of the corner of her eye. He has never seen this uncertainty in her, and didn't think she was capable of it.

"You called me on Christmas," he says. "Why?"

She shakes her head. "I didn't."

It surprises him how terrible she is at lying. "Why?" he asks again.

She falters. Just barely, he sees her eyelids flutter up at him, sees a thought struggling to leave her and then die on her lips.

"I'm really tired," she says.

It isn't an apology, or even an explanation. It is much less than he expected and a lot less than he deserves. But as the door to her room clicks shut behind her he feels the anger dissipating, feels his jaw unclench and his shoulders droop, feels a weary kind of acceptance settle over his buzzing nerves. He is exhausted. He props the shovel up against the wall, goes into his room and shuts his own door behind him, wondering why it's suddenly so much easier to close his eyes knowing that she is occupying a tiny space two rooms away.

* * *

Hey everyone! Thanks so much again for stopping by and reviewing, it really means a lot to hear from other Enjonine shippers. Sorry that I've been taking so long with updates. I keep falling asleep and having these like earth-shatteringly amazing ideas for this story and then writing them down and going back to sleep only to wake up later and be like what the ever loving fuck did I mean by any of this, did somebody drug me last night?

Anyway I'm going to go catch m'self up on some 31 days of Enjonine ... best part of my holiday season WITHOUT A DOUBT ;).


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: I do not own any rights to Les Miserables or any of the characters.

* * *

Embers

The next day he makes a trip to the hardware store to get salt to lay out on the ice in the parking lot when he runs into Cosette, walking out of neighboring craft store. His first impulse is to duck his head down and not say hello, and he isn't sure why. He regrets it almost immediately, but it turns out not to matter.

"Enjolras," she chirps, walking over to him anyway.

It's usually difficult for him to compose a smile for people, but there is something so easy and bright about Cosette that he finds himself smiling back. "Hey," he says. "What are you doing out this early?"

She hoists up the bags. "For the New Year's Party," she says, and then he sees that they're full of glittering paper plates and plastic cutlery and silly hats. She shrugs. "I got a little carried away. You're coming, right?"

"I, uh." The bag of salt is heavy and awkward in his hands. "What party?"

Cosette's free hand flies to her mouth. "Shoot. I told Ep to tell you. The boys didn't want to put it on Facebook after Courfeyrac's party got so out of control last time," she says, with a knowing little grin. He remembers that that was when she met Marius. Time feels suddenly distorted to him. It is strange to think that that was only three weeks ago, now that she seems like such a permanent fixture in Marius's life.

Enjolras nods. "I haven't seen her yet today."

"How are the two of you doing?" Cosette asks, and the question is innocent enough but he can tell from the way she is posing it that she and Eponine have already discussed it.

Enjolras treads carefully. "It's certainly a lot quieter than living with the boys."

She rolls her eyes good-naturedly. "They're quite the handful, I've been learning."

He tries to laugh but it just comes out as an agreeable grunt.

"They miss you," she says.

He shifts the weight of the salt bag in his hands. "I doubt it."

"They do." She hoists the bags up and sets her eyes on the little blue Honda across the parking lot. "See you tonight, then?"

"Maybe."

She gives him a patient smile and heads toward her car, trilling a good-bye as she goes.

When he gets home he finds Eponine curled up on the couch with a blanket up to her neck, her bare toes and the top of her face the only part of her exposed. On the screen is another dime-a-dozen Netflix movie where the heroine endures all sorts of romantic and personal trials while somehow never having a hair out of place. He doesn't know why he assumes Eponine would be above this kind of drivel. He doesn't know why he sometimes forgets she's a nineteen-year-old girl.

She raises her eyebrows at him in greeting, barely splitting her attention from the screen.

"Are you going to the party tonight?" Enjolras asks, setting the giant bag of salt down on the floor.

"Shit," she says candidly. "I knew I was supposed to tell you something." She puckers her mouth in thought for a moment and says, "I mean yeah, I guess I'm going. Are you?"

He shrugs, pulling his arms out of the sleeves of his coat and hanging it on the coatrack that Eponine has done a very good job of ignoring, leaving her jacket and her sweaters strewn in various places on the floor of her room. "Probably not."

"Aw, come on. It'll be fun."

"You didn't even know if you were going half a second ago."

"Yeah, but now I am." She throws the blanket off of herself and jumps up with astonishing energy. "I have the night off, might as well not waste it."

"When do you _sleep?_"

She grins at him, flashing those two crooked bottom teeth. "I don't need sleep, old man."

He can't help the punctuated, unexpected laugh that escapes him. "Excuse me?"

The grin grows more crooked, and her eyelids flash wide in mischief. "Are your old man ears failing you?" she asks, a parody of innocence and charm.

Her eyes are set straight on his, unflinching, anticipating his response. The longer she looks at him the more his ears burn. "At least this old man can legally drink," he says, his eyes sweeping the floor. He knows that among their friends he is probably the least witty, the least fun.

But her laugh is hoarse and gratifying. "So drink. Live a little."

He considers her, standing there in her ratty jeans and the chewed edges of her shirt collar, her face bright with excitement that seems disproportionate to a silly party. "I have a lot of reading to do before next semester."

She settles back onto the couch, draping the blanket around herself and burrowing comfortably into the corner. The expression on her face is a little bit smug, as if he has already agreed to go. He finds himself staring back at her, staring for a beat too long. He breaks his gaze and starts walking toward his room, but he swears he hears her laugh, low and quiet under her breath as he turns his back.

* * *

In all honesty he forgets about the party until there's a sharp knock on his door at nine o'clock. Before he can answer, Eponine calls out in her grating way, "Are you coming or what?"

He blinks himself out of the textbook he was highlighting. "Go on without me."

"Alright."

He sits there in the semi-darkness of his room, a little unused to how easily she gives up on him. Their friends have always coaxed and weedled and prodded him into the festivities. Eponine is gone from his door faster than a light breeze.

"How are you getting there?" he hears himself asking.

She must have already reached the front door, because her voice is much further away. "I'm walking," she calls back.

He hears the clunk-clunk of her shoving her feet into her boots, the jingle of her hand wrapping around the key she leaves on the kitchen counter.

"Wait."

He gets up from his desk so fast he almost sees stars. He's been sitting for hours on end, his shoulders sore from hunching over the endless pages, and now that he has been yanked back into reality he can't say that he remembers any of it. He shakes his head, wills it out of his thoughts.

She's leaning against the door, waiting for him with that same smug expression on her face.

"You shouldn't walk alone this late at night," he says.

"Oh, is that why you're coming?" she asks, an edge in her voice. Her chin is tilted toward the floor, her face cast in shadow. "How noble. How chivalrous. A big strong man to protect me on the perilous ten blocks to the party."

Her sarcasm isn't lost on him. In fact, it's insulting. "It has nothing to do with you being a girl. It's stupid to walk late at night by yourself in general."

"You're one to talk," she says, and in an instant she knows she has revealed too much. She takes the slightest of sidesteps away from him, suddenly preoccupied with the fraying lanyard that holds her apartment key.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he asks.

She purses her lips as if she has decided not to say something, but it pushes its way out of her anyway. "I can take care of myself, is what it means," she tells him. Before he can protest that it isn't a matter of who she is personally, that it isn't anything to do with gender or weakness but with just plain common sense, she goes on: "For months I have been running into you on _your_ long night walks, and you never noticed me _once_."

For a few beats he only stares at her.

"What?"

She is staring back, her eyes fierce, unwilling to look away first. He is oddly self-conscious, reflecting on every late stroll, every sleepless night that led him in circles around the campus, around the apartment complex, anywhere his tired feet would take him. He has always walked with the confidence of a man who knows he is alone, who thinks himself invisible.

And here he learns he has had a shadow all this time.

Before he can say anymore she breaks into an incongruous smile, suddenly as lively as a firework. "Let's go," she says, whipping around to open the door.

She grabs him by the crook of his elbow, the cold blustering in their faces as she pulls him out in one swoop. She stops only to lock the door behind them and then gives him one ungentle tug, pushing him forward, and then carelessly racing up ahead of him, her ugly brown boots thumping on the icy cement she is lucky he thought to salt down this morning.

He watches her retreating back in irritation. He doesn't want to go to this party. He doesn't even have his coat.

But then she's off, spiraling into the darkness, and he is surging ahead and trying to ignore the persistent ache of always being the one who can't catch up.

* * *

Enjolras doesn't realize just how much he has ostracized himself until they walk in and the apartment goes nearly silent. Eponine bounds in, throwing her coat on the couch as if she hasn't noticed, making an embarrassingly eager beeline for Marius; Enjolras stands in the doorway, unable to ignore Courfeyrac's low snicker and Combeferre's overly friendly expression, and the uneasy looks from everyone else that he suspects have everything to do with his living situation with Eponine.

"So good of you to join us," says Grantaire, who does not seem to be planning to share the fifth of rum in his hand.

Combeferre cuts in and says loudly, "It's good to see you Enjolras."

He's trying to smooth things over but it's only making it worse. Everyone's staring at him now, even Bahorel, who is usually as far on the fringes of the group as Enjolras. Enjolras ducks his head down toward the floor, wishing he had something to occupy himself, like a drink or a phone or a _smoke_. After a moment everyone starts milling around again, but it isn't until Joly yanks something out of Bossuet's hands and practically shrieks, "You can't eat food off the floor! Do you have any _idea_ how many people have stepped there?!" that some of the tension dissipates.

Then they are all back to their rowdy selves. Feuilly calls Joly a wuss and Jehan leaps up to clean the messy crumbs off the floor as Joly repeatedly bleats warnings about bacteria that Bossuet humors but ultimately ignores. Enjolras pushes through the front door and into the fray, toward the counter where all the beers are lined up. He picks one up a pops it open without even checking the label. He just needs something in his hands.

Courfeyrac shoves a glass under his nose. "Take a shot."

Enjolras rolls his eyes at his younger friend. "No, thanks."

"Take a shot and I'll maybe consider leaving you alone about the roommate situation for the rest of the night."

The beer is slippery with condensation, warming in his grasp. He is already uncomfortable, he is already out of place and itching to retreat. It seems impossible that he ever used to live here. These are his _friends_, and it's only been a few weeks but the way they are all regarding him it feels like a lifetime since he has seen them last; he can't remember the script he is supposed to follow, the natural order of things.

He purses his lips at Courfeyrac, whose forehead is already slick with sweat, whose best efforts to involve Enjolras in their shenanigans have almost always gone in vain.

"Maybe later," he concedes.

Courfeyrac's smile is wicked. "So when's the wedding?"

Enjolras takes the shot out of Courfeyrac's hand, stares at him solemnly, and then downs it without another word. He is not prepared for the burn of it, the ache in his throat and the fire in his stomach. He recovers before the shock reaches his face and says, "Are you done, then?"

Courfeyrac plucks the empty shot glass out of his hand, still grinning. "For now." He turns back to the coffee table, where most of their friends are now circled and playing a drinking game with cards. "Shouldn't we wait for Cosette? She's not back with the pizza."

"She's on my team anyway," says Marius, waving Courfeyrac off and settling onto the floor. Eponine settles in beside him without missing a beat, and Enjolras has to hand it to her, she is well-practiced in determining the closest distance she can sit from him without it attracting any unwanted attention.

Enjolras shifts his weight indecisively for a few moments as everyone mills around the room, and ends up settling in the empty space between Marius and Grantaire.

"Deigning to play our juvenile card games?" Grantaire quips.

Enjolras takes cards Jehan hands him and stares at them, not even sure what kind of game that they're playing, and not particularly caring. He checks his watch. It's ten o'clock. "Only until next year," he says.

He is always surprised when anything he says manages to earn a laugh. More than a few of their friends hear the exchange and maybe it's just the alcohol making them more pliant than usual or maybe it's that Enjolras only manages to execute a successful joke approximately once per month, but they all chuckle. Enjolras allows himself a small smile and looks over – Eponine has not noticed or seen.

"Pair up?" asks Grantaire, and only then does Enjolras realize it's a partnered game.

He shrugs. Grantaire adds his cards to Enjolras's pile and begins some methodical way of organizing them, presumably to help with the game. He's about to ask what the rules are but Grantaire speaks first.

"But seriously," he says, and his voice is low for once – usually Grantaire is about as subtle as a gun. "What's going on with you and the kid?"

"Nothing," says Enjolras firmly.

Grantaire's expression is difficult to read. He takes another swig from his bottle, as casually as someone drinking water, and then looks between Enjolras and the space to the left of him occupied by Eponine and then back at Enjolras again.

Enjolras tightens his grip on the beer in his hands, which has done nothing so far to make this night more endurable for him. "Honestly, nothing," he says.

Grantaire's expression is thoughtful, and then he shakes his head, just one curt movement. His smile is bare and wry. "You have no idea what you're getting into."

Enjolras stares back at him and for a split second he can't decide if he is angry or not. The implication is insulting. Grantaire of all people, who has known him the longest, knows that of everyone here Enjolras is easily the most disciplined, the most painfully self-aware. And here Grantaire is essentially accusing him of being an idiot, a victim of his own ignorance.

"Think whatever you want," says Enjolras, keeping his voice low. Eponine isn't listening anyway.

Maybe he has imagined it over the years, but it seems that the older they get the more bite Grantaire's words have. He is always like this, telling truths that Enjolras doesn't need to hear, reminding him of his own weakness whenever he can. "I actually _know_ Eponine," he says, and Enjolras can tell by the glint in his eye that Grantaire is fully aware of how irritating this is to him. "For several years now, in fact. And I'm telling you – "

"Grantaire, please," says Enjolras, making every effort not to snap at him. They haven't seen each other in days. The last thing he wants is for them to be at each other's throats. "It isn't an issue."

Grantaire raises his eyebrows but tilts his face away, staring across the room. "Remember this conversation, my friend," he says, resting the bottle on his lips but not taking a drink.

Enjolras knows better than to press the point, and besides, his chest is warm and his shoulders loose from the one shot he took. He lets it go, lets the words roll off into the swell of drunken conversation, focusing as Joly attempts to get everyone's attention long enough to explain the rules to the game.

"You look great, 'Ponine."

Enjolras doesn't mean to eavesdrop, but it's impossible not to hear Marius beside him, or Eponine's eager reply.

"Yeah?" she asks, leaning in toward him, her cheeks already red from alcohol.

Only then does Enjolras take a moment to appreciate that she has put some moderate effort into her appearance. She hasn't bothered with the dress or the haphazard curls from last time, but she's wearing the jeans without any holes in them, and a red sweater that buttons up the front. Her hair is pulled back out of her face, exposing her high forehead and her ears that stick out just slightly like an over eager puppy's.

"Yeah," says Marius. "Red's a nice color on you."

She fiddles with her sleeves and tucks her chin to her chest. Enjolras has never thought of her as shy, but in front of Marius she is someone else. Self-conscious. Hesitant.

The door bursts open and in comes Cosette, balancing four boxes of pizza. The room instantly erupts into semi-drunken cheers. Marius leaps up from the carpet to help her so fast that he knocks the cards out of Eponine's hands and they scatter at her feet.

She stares down at the cards for a few beats, and everyone is too distracted by the commotion to see the faint twitch of her lip as the smile hovers on her face, to see the slight hunch of her shoulders drawing her inward. She blinks and her face reanimates, and she starts collecting the cards and reorganizing them, her fingers nimble and shuffling.

Her eyes meet his. She has noticed him watching. She looks away too quickly, and Enjolras stops watching her after that.

The night unfolds without much surprise from there. Drunkenness doesn't seem to change anyone in their group all that much – alcohol only seems to magnify what is already in them. Combeferre is red-cheeked and talking a little faster than usual but every bit as well spoken as he always is; Courfeyrac and Jehan are howling in laughter over videos they keep pulling up on one of their computers, and Grantaire is his usual self, drifting in and out of the clusters of their friends, offering choice comments before passing through. Joly mutters a little less about mutant diseases cropping up in Asia and Bossuet is his usual agreeable self.

In the corner Eponine is discussing something at length with Feuilly and nodding vigorously. It occurs to Enjolras that Feuilly has been studying abroad for months now and has probably never met the girl before. She seems to have this persistent and matchless ability to worm her way into people's lives the moment she meets them, and for some reason this revelation is disheartening to Enjolras. He is not the only one whose life she has crashed into—he is not special at all.

He finishes the beer in his hands and gets up to grab another. He thinks that the kitchen will be empty but he finds Marius and Cosette pressed up against a wall, eyes shut, fingers kneading into each other's backsides and necks and hair. They are so lost in each other that they give no indication of awareness when Enjolras enters the room, or even awareness that there is a party going on around them. Enjolras wonders why everyone is on his case for being antisocial when the two of them have all but started using the kitchen as their bedroom.

When he gets back into the kitchen the volume on the television is blaring and Eponine has mounted the table, half-empty beer in hand, shouting something that is steadily attracting attention over the noise.

"Fifteen," she screams, her voice hoarse, her smile wide and her cheeks flushed. "_Four_teen. _Thir_teen."

Collectively the boys all start to join in, watching the footage of the ball about to drop in Times Square. Grantaire and Jehan jump up to join Eponine, the three of them precariously settled on a table that may or may not support all of their weight; Enjolras hears a shrill giggle behind him and then Marius and Cosette are rushing back into the living room, joining the crowd, passing him on their way.

It feels for a moment as if he is watching from behind a pane of glass. He stands a mere few feet away from the group of them, watching them revel and scream, their eyes bright and their voices hoarse and their limbs flush and careless. He admires them jealously. Their happy crows, their togetherness, the way they are all so uninhibited around each other.

It takes him a second to notice a hand extended toward him. He glances up and it's Eponine, her face expectant and grinning. He takes her hand and before he can gain any of his wits she pulls him into the mayhem, practically shrieking into his ear: "_Seven! Six! Five!_"

Everything around him is buzzing, disorganized chaos and sweat. Combeferre wraps an arm around his shoulder and Courfeyrac drunkenly knocks into his other side but Enjolras finds himself getting caught up in the fervor and not minding one bit.

Eponine punctuates every second that goes by with a jab of her fist in the air, as if she is singlehandedly demanding time push them into the next year. Her other hand slips out of Enjolras's and she jumps back up onto the table into Grantaire's waiting arms, and the two of them link fists and scream in unison, until the floors of the apartment are pulsing their collective feet, voices, and thrumming hearts:

"_Three! TWO! OOONNEEEE!" _

They all burst apart, jumping around each other, Jehan blowing out of a kazoo and Bahorel setting off some sort of snapping miniature firecrackers that Enjolras is one hundred percent sure are not sanctioned by the landlord. His friends are all crashing into him, from the sides and behind, slapping each other's backs and stumbling around raucously. It is all noise and lights and skin on skin, breathless excitement,

Enjolras lets himself get caught in the fray, enduring the madness, and for a few fleeting seconds he almost loses himself. He almost believes that he is a part of something larger than he is. He imagines the Earth spinning in silent, solemn space, finishing another cycle around the sun, and laughs out loud at the absurdity of it all, at how they mark the passage of time and give it such importance and the earth just keeps moving under their feet completely unaware.

He is too far gone, further than the rest of them. It is Eponine who pulls him back, reaching out for him again, her sweaty fingers extended and gripping too tight around his forearm. "Happy new year!" she shrieks, and in the periphery he can plainly see Marius's hand tilting Cosette's chin upward, can see the way her body arches to respond to his touch, fierce and compelled as their lips meet.

"Happy new year," he tells Eponine, and even though it has nothing to do with him he hopes she doesn't turn around.

* * *

By two in the morning Enjolras has retreated to a corner of the couch and is itching for an excuse to leave, but the party is still in full swing. Every time he tries to get up somebody announces a toast or starts another game, and now that everything is less tense and the group seems to have welcomed him back despite his moving out, he doesn't want to wreck it by being the first to leave. It's too noticeable. He's thinking he'll just leave without the formality of a goodbye – nobody here will miss him anyway – when he sees Eponine waving sloppily at everyone and blowing kisses at the front door.

Everyone calls a good-bye out to her, and Enjolras blinks in surprise as the front door slams and she disappears into the night.

"Where are you going?" Jehan asks. "Enj!"

She is already halfway across parking lot by the time Enjolras makes it outside. It's blisteringly, unforgivably cold, the wind slapping at the exposed skin of his cheeks and neck and forearms like a whip.

She hears his footfalls and turns around. When she sees him there she smiles at him, but not before he sees the telltale glimmer in her eye, not before she blinks too hard and too fast and swallows something back.

"All partied out?" she asks, her voice thick.

He nods. "You're going home, then?"

She shakes her head, unabashedly wiping her nose with her sleeve. "Montparnasse is picking me up."

He's too tired to hide the disapproval in his voice: "Oh."

Eponine laughs lowly, taking a step back and doing an uncommitted half-spin in the empty lot. Enjolras is hugging his arms to his chest and wondering how she is impervious to this cold, the way she seems to be impervious to everything. Her laugh dies on the wind and she is still standing there, rocking a bit unsteadily on her feet. Her next words are quiet and internal, but there is no doubt that she is addressing him: "You think I'm an idiot."

"I don't like Montparnasse," Enjolras admits.

She is not offended. Her smile is persevering. "Sometimes I'm afraid he knows me better than anyone in the world."

Enjolras doesn't know where this is coming from – how she wants him to respond, why she is choosing him to say this to. He feels an unwarranted possessiveness, because he thinks he might know her, thinks he might understand. For all of her friendships, for all of her boundless energy and acceptance, for all of the instances when she plainly doesn't care what other people think, Eponine is an outsider. She does not belong. She is like him – some unnamed force keeps her separate, keeps her different, keeps her untouchable and strange.

It is breaking her heart. He wonders how long she has been in love with Pontmercy, but he is guessing from the way she stares, from the way she aches and pines so painfully from a calculated distance but never dares say a word, that it has been a long time.

"You told me you thought I was a good person once," she says. "Montparnasse knows I'm not."

Enjolras feels an irritation surge through him. There is no way to reach her, no way to communicate himself without her twisting it into something else. "What do you want me to say, then?" he asks. "You want me to tell you you're a bad person? Is that what you want?"

She gnaws on her lip, looking defensive, looking frustrated with him. Her silence only aggravates him further.

"Would that make you think highly of me, too?" he goes on.

Her eyes meet his, steely and resolved. "I do think highly of you," she says, without a trace of self-consciousness or doubt.

The promptness of her reply is momentarily disarming. "Well?" he says back. "Why does his opinion count?"

She purses her lips. "It's not opinion. It's fact." She stares down at the pavement, fixated by something at her feet. He waits. "If you knew me – if you _really_ knew me – you would see it, too."

"Eponine, that's – "

Her ears perk at the sound of him saying her name, but she interrupts him just the same. "And I don't want to be that person with you. It's kind of silly. But I like the way you think of me. And when I'm around you – I think maybe I can be more like you. Somebody good."

He has never seen a smile with so many cracks in it.

"I'm sorry," she says, taking another involuntary step back from him. She shrugs to herself. "That was a weird thing to say."

He is demanding explanations and understanding less and less as she gives them to him. His arms are wooden, crossed in front of his chest, scowling at her in the dark. Again he is struck by the intimacy of her presumptions to know him, to think highly of him at all; he has done nothing to deserve it, nothing but show time and time again that he is incapable of maintaining relationships even with his oldest friends, incapable of expressing his desires, incapable of loving anyone at all.

She takes a few steps toward him, the sole of her broken sneaker lapping against the pavement. Her lashes are shining and wet and her eyes earnest.

_I don't want to change you_, he wants to tell her. If Montparnasse can be honest, so can he. _I wouldn't change one thing_.

"I know it's not midnight anymore," she says, and she is astonishingly close to him now, so close that he can see the flecks of mismatched brown in her eyes in the light of the streetlamp. "But … "

And then she stands on her tiptoes and kisses him. Just a soft peck on the lips, noiseless and quick, over before it happens. Her lips are cold as ice. His entire body flinches in response to her, his arms jerking to his sides, paralyzed with shock and indecision.

"Goodnight," she says, and then he sees the pair of headlights screeching into the lot, the faint outline of Montparnasse's pick-up truck.

She bounds away from him then, and he is left standing there with the ghost of an intention on his fingertips – of the arms he could have wrapped around her, of kiss he might have deepened, of the moment he could have stolen and the chance she might have let him take.

He is a coward. She hops into the pick-up without looking back, and he walks to the apartment alone in the darkness, where the electricity of her lips on his keeps him awake until long after the sun has risen on the new year.

* * *

Hey guys! Thanks so much for the feedback! I've been traveling through all of Christmas so I had lots of time to write for this update. My mom was super concerned because at one point we apparently had such bad turbulence on a flight that people were screaming and clutching each other and I just continued to casually beat out fanfiction with my ear buds in. I mean let's be real if that plane went down I'd have been so pissed if it through of my groove.

Merry Christmas!

And if I don't update before then, Happy New Year, too!


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: I do not own any rights to Les Miserables or any of the characters.

* * *

Embers

Enjolras doesn't see Eponine again for two more days. He figures out she must be home when he hears the whine of the teakettle going off early one morning. Knowing she usually won't stick around for too long, he pulls on his sweats and pushes his hair down and blusters into the kitchen.

She is barely awake, her eyes wide and puffy from sleep, her pajama shirt wrinkled. "Morning," she says from her perch on the couch.

"Rule three."

She frowns at him, clutching to the mug in her hands. "Hmm?"

He stands there, wondering how often in their lives she will make him feel like a fool. "Rule three," he says, with less force behind it this time. "No funny business."

She nods at him slowly. Skeptically. "Alright," she says, squinting a little bit.

His heart is hammering in his chest. She doesn't remember. The thought of it has not left his mind since it happened, and here she is with her hair in ridiculous knots and last night's make-up smeared on her face, the very introduction of the chaos in his conflicted chest, and she doesn't remember a thing.

"New Year's," he presses, raising his eyebrows at her.

It takes her an insulting moment to gather what he means. "Oh," she says. Then her eyes widen. "Oh, shit. You mean _that?_"

"Yes," he says, shifting his weight to his other foot.

She grins, and there is something teasing in it, something that makes him uncomfortable and indignant. "Oh, Enjolras, I – " It is clear that she is trying not to laugh. His skin is crawling with heat and shame. "I'm sorry," she concedes. "You're right."

There is something unbearably condescending in her apology. Of the way the kiss apparently meant nothing to her; of how amusing she finds it that it might mean something to him.

"You made the rule," he reminds her, his voice gruff.

"I know, I know," she says, and she is solemn now, picking up the anger in his tone. "I'm sorry." She clears her throat, clutching more firmly to the tea mug, staring at the steam. "It won't happen again."

His fingernails are cutting into the sink of his palms. "Good."

He retreats back into his bedroom then, and there is some lingering disappointment, a nagging feeling that they left something unsaid. But he thinks of that mocking glint in her eye and shuts off the light and goes back to sleep, because if he stays out there she will know he is angry with her, and he won't be able to tell her why.

* * *

The next few weeks are painfully stilted. Enjolras does not mean to go out of his way to avoid her, but in the brief instances that they are in the apartment together he can't think of anything worth saying to her, so more often than not he leaves. Eponine never says anything about it. He doubts she even notices. And then the semester picks up and she starts taking more shifts at work and suddenly there's an excuse enough for all the time they spend apart that they leave the issue completely unaddressed.

Not much else changes. Enjolras still hangs out on the fringes of their group, and they celebrate Jehan's twenty-first birthday. Montparnasse's pick-up truck makes an unfortunate number of appearances outside the apartment to collect or drop off Eponine late at night. Combeferre discovers that he has been accepted into a graduate program for social work, and it snows a few more times, and Marius tells Cosette he loves her for the first time by taking her to some mountain vineyard and then drunkenly recounts every detail of it the next day with her blushing good-naturedly beside him.

Eponine slides her rent check under his door. He was hoping she would give it to him in person, but even as he plucks it up from the carpet he has no idea what he would have said to her if she did.

Mid-afternoon in the beginning of February there's a knock on the door. Enjolras answers it to a mousy, painfully skinny girl with frizzy auburn hair and skin as pale as milk. She stares at him vacantly.

"Can I help you?"

She's looking past him, into the apartment. "I might have the wrong address," she mumbles.

"Are you looking for Eponine?"

She nods.

Enjolras stands uselessly in the threshold. "Well, she's not here."

"Who are you?" the girl asks. As if he is the one knocking on _her_ door unannounced.

"I'm Enjolras," he says warily, not sure if he should extend his hand to shake. It turns out not to matter. The girl is distracted, looking past him into the apartment, taking in what little she can see of the appliances in the kitchen and the couch in the living room.

She frowns. "I didn't know Eponine had a boyfriend."

"I'm not." He accidentally bites the inside of his cheek and tastes metal. "Her boyfriend, I mean. Who are you?"

"Azelma," she says, finally making eye contact with him, and even when she manages that there is something faraway in her stare, as if she sees the outline of him and nothing else. "Her sister."

"Well – I'm not sure when she'll be back. Do you need anything?"

She shakes her head, pulling at sides of her winter coat. The zipper on the bottom is gnarled and broken. "Can you tell her Gavroche ran away again? I'm sure he'll turn back up soon, it's just that she always seems to know where he is."

"Sure," he says. He looks out at the road. Most of the snow from the night before has melted. "I'm not busy now, if you need help looking. What kind of dog is he?"

"What?" she asks, and only then, in her indignant expression, does he see some similarity to Eponine.

"Gavroche," Enjolras supplies.

Azelma scowls at him, and then the resemblance between them, if only in their features, is uncanny. Her face has that same unselfconscious way of betraying exactly what she is thinking."Gavroche isn't a dog. He's our brother."

"Oh," he says, remembering with startling clarity those few months ago when he passed Eponine on the bus, pointing at a textbook with a wiry, shaggy-haired boy. Only then does the appropriate amount of alarm blossom in his chest. "Is he going to be okay? Where should we look for him?"

Azelma shrugs. "Just tell Eponine, okay? I've got to go to work."

She's so young that she can't possibly be out of high school. He sees a waitressing apron curled around her fist. How many siblings does Eponine have? Why hasn't he ever thought to ask?

"I'll look for him," says Enjolras. "Where should I go?"

"You don't even know what he looks like," says Azelma, waving him off. She turns from the doorway and starts heading out toward the sidewalk. "He'll come back eventually, he always does. Thanks anyway."

"Do you need a ride?" he calls after her.

She ignores him. Enjolras runs back into the apartment to grab his coat and his keys, but by the time he runs back out she has turned one of the corners into a side street to god knows where. He hops into his car and drives to the Corner Bar in case Eponine is there, but the place isn't even open yet – where does she go during the day? She must have another job, why has he never asked?

It occurs to him to try her cell, and he is not surprised when it goes straight to voicemail. He tries to think back to that day he passed them at the park. How old was the kid – twelve? Thirteen? He remembers his hair was brown and his sneakers were huge. Would he even recognize him if he passed him on the street?

He drives around the downtown strip, and around the park where he saw them last. Very few people are out, and none of them are her brother's age anyway. Still, he finds himself driving into side streets, ducking past the train tracks, any of the little crevices he can think of – looking for skinny-limbed boy, or even for the girl Azelma who disappeared faster than Alice down the rabbit hole.

Without meaning to he misses an entire class. He only notices once it is nearing dark, and then he heads back to the apartment, thinking at the very least he can catch Eponine before her shift and let her know what's happening. He's approaching the apartment when he hears a commotion – one of the doors from inside slamming, and hoarse, unsophisticated shouting:

" — were you _thinking?_ Honestly, I told you to _text_, I told you to _call_ – "

"I just went out for a few hours! I do it all the time! I don't know why you're – "

"Azelma says you cut class. _Again_." It's Eponine. Enjolras doesn't mean to eavesdrop but it's hard not to. He has never heard her so riled up. "I don't give a shit about whether or not you go home to them after, roam the streets, do whatever the fuck you want, but you do _not skip school_, do you understand?"

"You're not my _mother_."

"Oh, god, Gav, don't turn this into some bleeding cliché."

"Seriously, where do you get off? When you were my age you pulled shit like this all the time – "

"Watch your language – "

"Are you _kidding_ right now?!"

" – and I will have you know, I _never_ cut school. _Ever_. If anything you should appreciate that that's the one place you can get the hell away from them, and believe me, if you quit this early then you've lost your only ticket out."

Gavroche's voice can't decide on a pitch, wrestled with pubescent emotion. "Oh yeah? Then what are you still doing here, 'Ponine? Fat lot of good finishing school did for _you_."

It takes a moment for Eponine to answer him, and Enjolras can barely hear her. She has calmed her voice significantly. "It's not even about that. It's about your safety. We had _no idea_ where you were."

"I can take care of myself."

Enjolras can't help but exhale at the irony. He knows where he's heard that before.

"No, you can't. You're twelve."

"They don't even notice when I'm gone."

"You scared _me_. Alright? Okay? Is that reason enough?" Eponine's voice is so rough that he didn't know it was capable of reaching such a high octave. "I don't care about them. You scared _me_, and that isn't fair. If anything ever happened to you …"

There must be some sort of acknowledgement then, some sort of surrender or apology, but whatever it is Enjolras can't hear it. He feels acutely wrong for having stood here for so long, the hairs on the back of his neck pricking uncomfortably. He's about to back away for the door, thinking their silence can only mean that the door is about to swing open and reveal him here, but before he can, hears Eponine's voice, low and gentle.

"It's okay," she says. She sounds older than her years. Weary. Forgiving. "It's okay, Gav. Just please don't let it happen again."

* * *

Enjolras leaves the apartment before they can find him standing there. He gets in touch with his professor, apologizes for missing class and doesn't bother with an excuse, and then sends out an e-mail at the mercy of his study group hoping that they can let him read their notes to catch up. A pretty girl from their group gets in touch with him, and meets him at the library, and it occurs to him as they're poring over their notes on abortion precedents that her shoulder is pressing up against him, that her knee is grazing his, that she nods a little more emphatically and holds his gaze for too long.

Afterward she asks him if he wants to get coffee, and he tells her that it's late, maybe some other time.

It's nearing one in the morning by the time he comes home. He isn't at all careful about unlocking the door or letting himself in, shaking his keys with impatience, throwing his book bag noisily in the threshold. He is surprised to find Eponine asleep on the couch, sleeping straight through all the ruckus, her breathing deep and even and her thin body flung in all directions.

He sees a half-empty beer bottle on the coffee table and feels an unanticipated pang in his gut. He misses her. It's a weird notion to have, because he sees her all the time, and even in their short friendship he can count the number of significant conversations they've had on one hand, but still – he misses her and her brashness, her childish excitement, her brutal honesty and her tired, hopeful eyes. It's been a long time since they've spoken. He knows he has nobody but himself to blame.

He settles down on the couch beside her with one of his textbooks, anticipating that she'll wake up eventually. It is so quiet in this room that all he can hear is the sound of her breathing and a faint wind rattling the net outside the window.

He rarely gets to look at her without her knowing it. Her face is constantly in motion – she is always gnawing at the end of a sleeve or a pencil or a fingernail, she is always lifting her eyebrows in comical surprise or outright laughter, always contorting her mouth into a little knot when she sees something that doesn't meet her approval.

In her sleep she is slack and almost unrecognizable to him. He has become accustomed to being able to read whatever thought crosses her mind by the expression on her face. Maybe it is why it is simpler talking to Eponine than it is for him to talk to anyone else – he never has to wonder where he stands, never has to wonder what she really thinks of him. He knows this well enough to know that if she opened her eyes right now, if he said a few casual and lighthearted words to her, she would answer him in an instant and forgive whatever awkwardness he has caused by avoiding her in the last month.

She shifts in her sleep, rolling just slightly, and he thinks she might wake up but she doesn't. The seams of her t-shirt push up and reveal the flat, pale plane of her stomach; he doesn't mean to look, but something catches his eye, and it looks like a bandage – no, a patch.

It's one of the smaller ones, not the wider ones that people trying to quit smoking use in the beginning, which means that she must have been at it for more than a few weeks.

He remembers those first few weeks well. The frustration, the way his fingers shook, the way he clenched his jaw until his teeth ached; the pulsing headache behind his eyes, and the ever present urge to just shut them in the middle of class, just let his eyelids slide to a close and rest his head in his palms and just _one more cigarette_, and then he'd be _done_ –

But he had persevered. And silently, steadily, painfully, so would Eponine.

She shifts minutely again and the patch is out of sight. He wonders about these depths of her he still hasn't seen – the enigma of her parents, her offbeat sister and wayward brother, the circumstances that led to her wandering the streets at night without any fear in her heart and making friends with people like Montparnasse. It seems neglectful that he has never asked before, but he supposes neither of them talk much about their families or childhoods, even to their other friends.

A few minutes pass. He doesn't regret deciding to offer her the room, he decides, sitting here in the quiet with her. For some reason this apartment with her feels more like home than any other place has ever been.

When he gets up off the couch his weight shifts the cushions and Eponine sucks in a breath and opens her eyes. "Hey," she says, blinking at him with a wobbly, sleepy smile. She swipes at her eyes with her sleeves. "You're back."

He smiles back, feeling an inexplicable swell of relief. "Yeah. Sorry if I woke you."

She yawns widely, and hoists herself up into a sitting position. He watches as she unconsciously touches the seam of her shirt, where the patch is stuck to her skin. "No, no," she says, "I didn't mean to fall asleep here anyway."

The apartment is so still in the twilight that he feels a sense of displacement, as if the two of them are somewhere else, as if they do not have worlds that exist outside of this room. She stares back at him so openly, so boldly, that he has the sudden impression that he could ask her anything and get an honest answer out of her.

He means to ask her about her family. He means to ask her where she spends all her days and nights, how she disappears so frequently and returns without ever acknowledging she was gone. He means to ask her if things will ever feel normal between them again, even if they never felt normal in the first place.

Instead he asks, "What do you want to do with your life?"

She bites her upper lip, her brow puckering.

Maybe the question has annoyed her. "I'm sorry. I'm sure people ask you that all the time."

"No," she says thoughtfully, still frowning to herself. "Actually, I think you might be the first person who's ever really asked."

He hesitates for a moment. He's already standing. It would be easy to shrug the question off and walk back to his room, easy and predictable of him. She wouldn't think anything of it. It would be harder to sit back down and hope that she doesn't balk at how personal this conversation suddenly feels, in these early hours after so many weeks spent apart.

She looks away first, and it's almost like permission. Go. Leave. It's fine.

He sits down and the noise of it startles her into staring back up.

"Well?" he asks.

She finishes righting herself on the couch. Her body is like a magnet, and without much effort she is leaning her shoulder against his, and then pressing herself into him. The couch is not nearly small enough to necessitate this, but he doesn't say anything, doesn't move to accommodate her. Her body is still warm with sleep.

"A teacher, maybe," she says. She tucks her chin into her chest and stares at her lap. The words sounds sticky on her tongue, as if she has never dared voice them out loud to anyone before. "I might be good at that."

He nods. "You'll go back to school, then."

"Someday," she says.

He shifts on the couch again, away from her, forcing her to look up at him. She is surprised to see the fierceness in his expression, and he really doesn't mean to be harsh, but he fears it comes out that way anyway: "No. Do it now."

She stares at him, open-mouthed. A tiny crack of an exhalation escapes her, as if she will make an excuse, or try to explain, but she thinks the better of it and shakes her head. "I can't just do that."

"Why?" Enjolras asks. "Is it the money? Take out a loan."

"It's not the money," she says, shaking her head again, holding her arms at her chest.

"Then what is it?"

"I'm busy." The more he presses her the more withdrawn she becomes, hugging herself tighter, lifting her heels from the carpet to the couch cushions.

He shouldn't press the point, but he thinks of that little white patch on her stomach, thinks of the ache in her expression that night when she told him she wanted to be somebody _good_, and he has to believe that the world isn't set against this girl who tries and wants and cares too much. He has to believe that she will end happily.

"With what? What are you doing all day?"

She runs her fingers through the top of her hair, but it gets caught in the tangles. She jerks it out impatiently. "Working."

"Where?"

"My dad's friend … has a cleaning business."

There is a strain in her voice, a reluctance in it that pleads him not to ask anything more. So he doesn't.

"Quit," he tells her. "This is more important."

"I can't just _quit_," she says, and when her eyes flash he is reminded of how she lost her temper with her brother, just hours before. She gnaws at her upper lip again, and presses herself tighter against the couch. Her eyes flick to the door and he wonders how this escalated so quickly, but knows that he can't back down now.

"Why?"

"Because – _because_," she exclaims. She looks at him now and when she sees the unyielding expression on his face her cheeks flame bright red, indignant and embarrassed. "Because I can't just – it's my _dad_."

"If he cares about you, he'll understand."

And then she laughs at him. Terse and biting. He has pushed it too far. "Where did you _come_ from?" she asks him, and in one quick sweep she has removed herself from the couch and walked halfway across the room. It is disorienting to have to look up at her, when usually she barely grazes his chin. She turns back around and says, "You have never dealt with a man like my father."

It is the most forthcoming she has been about her parents since he met her, and it is just enough for him to understand the underlying truth. "Why are you so afraid of him?"

"Haven't you figured it out by now?" Eponine snaps at him. She is angry. He sees her hands quaking from the wrists, her skin flushing all the way to the tops of her ears. "He's a _criminal_, Enjolras. A down and out criminal. And me, I'm just a chip off the old block," she says, and she is suddenly breathless, suddenly so worked up that he thinks she might start to cry, that it might even be a relief if she did, but instead the words just keep ripping out from some dark place inside of her: "You saw me in that jail that day. Don't pretend you don't know. I'm just like him."

He has always suspected this misery inside of her, thrumming just under the surface, hovering in the grovel of her voice at the end of every sentence she speaks. But she has no discipline, no ability to reign herself in, at least not in this moment when he has caught her off guard and is pressing against nerves he doubts anyone else in their group of friends has ever dared to tap.

"He doesn't decide for you," says Enjolras, and the words feel empowering enough that despite his childhood, despite every calculated and steady choice he made to please his parents over the years, he almost believes them. "_You_ decide. It's your life."

"They need me," she says. "As the bait. The distraction. I – " Her eyes squeeze shut and her hands form fists that she splays out in one angry, resolute gesture that seems to take the effort of every muscle in her small body. "I _told _you." She's practically spitting at him now, pointing, her tone accusatory. "I told you, I'm not a good person. Are you happy now?"

He isn't happy, but he knows he wouldn't take it back. The confessions are like wraiths leaving her body, and he thinks to himself that it doesn't matter what she says or does next, none of it will surprise him, none of it will make him feel any less determined to purge her of all of her misplaced guilt that has held her back all her nineteen years.

"You don't owe them anything," says Enjolras. "I think what you're _really_ scared of is trying for the things you _want_."

"I'm not _scared!_" she snarls at him, enunciating the last word with repugnance. It is all she can do, he sees, not to snarl at him. He has never seen a storm so steady. "There is a difference," she says between her teeth, "between _fear_ and _being realistic_."

They have dug much deeper than whatever her career aspirations are. Deeper even than the twisted dynamic between her and her parents. She sucks in one indignant, telling breath, and in it her pain is so stark that he can almost feel it resonating in his own bones.

He almost tells her that Pontmercy isn't worth any of this. That he is too lovesick, too sheltered, too unworthy – he will never appreciate her in all of her parts, the plain and the unseen, the startling vulnerability and strength. He will never dare to make her this angry, because he will never realize that this is the only way to extract her truths. He will accept her, yes, but he will do it blindly, without ever understanding what lurks behind her eyes.

He doesn't want this conversation to veer any further into that direction. "Just think about what I said," he tells her.

She purses her lips and stares down at their carpet, then says abruptly, "I'm going for a walk."

He doesn't try to stop her. Once the door slams behind her he sinks into the couch, suddenly exhausted beyond measure, as if the exchange has drained him completely. He doesn't want to fix her. He doesn't want to change her at all. But he thinks that maybe there has to be someone who is brutal with her in this way, someone who will care enough to endure this, and if nobody else has then it will have to be him. It will have to be now. Before enough time passes that she really starts to believe the tired, hopeless words coming out of her tiny mouth.

After a few minutes he gets up off the couch and heads to his room. She won't want him to be here when she returns.

* * *

Three days later there's a knock on his door. It's six in the morning. His heart leaps into his throat and chases away whatever dream he was having, the image of it like loose strands spilling out of his fingers.

"What?" he croaks.

"I quit."

There's still phlegm in his throat. Sometime in the last few days he ended up catching the cold that has been milling through their friend group, despite Joly's aggressive purchasing and distribution of hand sanitizer and desperate pleas to cough into their elbows and not their hands.

Before he can ask what she means, she says, "I quit working with my dad."

He squints in the darkness. The sun won't rise for at least another two hours. "Oh," he manages. "Okay."

Silence on the other end.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

"Yeah."

She doesn't say anything more, but he has the distinct sense that she is still hovering just outside his door.

"Do you – do you need something?"

"No. Sorry if I woke you."

The entire episode is so short that he falls back asleep almost immediately, and the sound of Eponine's voice nonsensically tangles and weaves its way into his dreams.

* * *

When he wakes up a few hours later he immediately looks for Eponine in the apartment, but somehow despite having quit her job with her father she is already gone for the day. He wonders if she is out to find a new one, and hopes that she isn't. She should be using the extra time to take classes. He has an idea of the amount of tips she brings in from drunk undergraduates and is fairly certain that the bartending job is more than enough to pay for food and rent.

It's a Saturday. He tries to spend the day studying and succeeds until nearly six o'clock, when Courfeyrac practically bangs down the door and claims he's been texting him all day. Apparently Joly passed his examination to volunteer as an ambulance driver, and the only appropriate way they can think to celebrate is getting wildly drunk at the old apartment.

Enjolras reluctantly follows him, but not before leaving a note on the fridge to tell Eponine about the party. He knows she laughs at that kind of thing, but he doubts she'll check her texts and he doesn't want her to think Courfeyrac came all the way over here and forgot about her when it was his every intention to collect them both.

The night is endurable. He allows himself one beer and ends up stuck on the porch with Jehan for the better part of the night, who gets moony-eyed and altogether more drunk than he ever has, as if turning twenty-one a few weeks prior is permission to get more wasted than he was already doing underage. After Jehan actually, literally exclaims about Virginia Woolf so loudly that a neighbor yells for them to put a sock in it, Enjolras extricates himself from the party and assures everyone that he's fine to get home on his own.

It's mildly nice out that night, at least by February's standards. It is a far cry from springtime but certainly more tolerable than the snow that has been wreaking havoc on the sidewalks periodically. Enjolras decides to take the long way, through the campus. It's not that late and he has nothing better to do when he gets home.

He's only about half a mile away from the apartment when he hears the rush of footsteps behind him, and then and immediate, searing pain in his knee. So quickly he cannot even fathom how it has happened, somebody has struck him from behind, and he absorbed most of the impact of the fall in the knee that is now with burning with pain on the concrete.

"What the _f _– "

He barely gets a view of the stranger, who is roughly his size and maybe ten years older, before his meaty fist connects with Enjolras's jaw and sends him sprawling back on the pavement.

It's then that the adrenaline starts pulsing in his veins. He scrambles to his feet half-blind, faster and more capable than he's ever been. It would be cowardly to run but it would be stupid not to. Before he can decide one way or another he sees something glint in the darkness and feels the blade of a knife against his chest.

The man's eyes are beady, his brow coated in sweat.

"What do you want?" asks Enjolras, panting. He reaches for his back pocket to remove his wallet, but the man jerks the knife just enough to stop his hand.

"Don't move a muscle," the man tells him, his voice cool and slick in the dark.

This is making less sense by the second. "What … do you want?" Enjolras repeats, this time less patiently than the first.

The man's eyes are looking past him now, darting to the left and the right. Are there more of them? The man is just distracted enough that Enjolras might have exactly one second to run for it before the man gained back enough of his wits to sink the blade into him, but then the moment is passed and his dark eyes are once again boring into Enjolras.

His next words are chilling: "Where is the girl?"

Enjolras doesn't have to ask to know that he is referring to Eponine.

The man shoves his free hand onto Enjolras's shoulder and near shakes him. He can feel the spit from his words on his cheek. "_Where is she?_"

There is a clatter and the sound of broken glass and then the man in front of him is teetering, his eyes directionless, his body slumping to the ground. Enjolras looks past him and sees Eponine standing with a broken bottle in her hand and a mortally terrified expression on her face.

For a moment they only stare at each other, paralyzed, breathing hard.

The man starts to quiver back to life at their feet.

"_Run_," she shouts.

He flinches, about to take off, but she hasn't budged.

"Go," she screams, dropping the remnants of the broken bottle with a clatter. The man starts to claw his way back up, clumsily reaching out for her, and she takes a few steps back but clearly has no intention of leaving.

He will not go without her. The very idea that she thinks he is capable of it makes his stomach wrench.

"No," he starts to say. "Not unless you – "

Eponine's ears perk before he even hears it. More footsteps. They are distant but moving fast. Enjolras entertains the idea that it might be campus police, but Eponine clearly has no intention of finding out. She is flying toward him in an instant, only hovering a second to make sure that he follows, and then the two of them tear off into the night.

* * *

Surprise! I got my act together and updated before the New Year!

Thanks so much again for the reviews and follows, guys! I've been discovering the beautiful Tumblr - shaped blackhole that is the Enjonine fandom (if I just keep scrolling down the Enjonine posts I might never have to interact with real human beings againnnn) and I am so happy to see that the story is getting positive responses, and that a very dear human on the site even made a picture set for the story! (I've been doing some too, but I literally have no idea what I'm doing, except I'm pretty sure at some point I'm going to be put on an FBI watch list for googling "aaron tveit sad" too many times in the course of one month).

If you want to be Tumblr buddies, I'm at the very subtle and discrete account name happyfreeconfusedandlonelyohyeah (shocker, guys: I'm twenty two!).


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: I do not own any rights to Les Miserables or any of the characters.

* * *

Embers

Enjolras can practically feel his head starting to split in two as he follows Eponine, whose agility and knowledge of the back paths of the campus would be impressive if he were not breathless and brimming with panic. In and out she weaves, through corners of buildings he has never seen, spilling into loading docks and back alleys until she suddenly stops.

He looks on all sides of him and cannot recognize one single landmark.

"You have to go home," she pants.

He can barely see her in the darkness, only a vague outline. It doesn't help that his head is still spinning from the blow.

"Who _was_ that?"

"I'm so sorry," says Eponine, "oh, god, I really am sorry. I had no idea – "

"Do you _know_ him?"

"Just go back to the apartment," she says, "please, just go back, and lock all the doors, if you head out this way – "

"_No_," he yells, and then she flinches, her hand flying up to her mouth in the darkness, warning him to lower his voice. He obliges, just barely. "If you think I'm leaving you out here alone, you've lost your mind."

"This has nothing to do with you," she says, practically scolding him. He shuffles forward to try and get a better view of her and they hit a faint vein of light coming from the building beside them. She perceives his bruising eye and hisses in remorse. "I'm so sorry," she says again.

She reaches out like she might touch his face but he jerks away. "Tell me what's going on. Does this have anything to do with you quitting that job?"

Her silence is as good an answer as any.

"Shit," says Enjolras, pressing a hand to his forehead.

A breathy noise escapes her, and if he isn't mistaken it sounds like a laugh. He looks toward her sharply.

"I don't think I've ever heard you swear before," she says.

His thoughts are spinning so fast that he is barely even listening to her. "Were they going to hurt you?" he asks lowly.

She hears the rustle of her shifting her weight between her feet. "My father wouldn't have let them," she says, but there is some reservation in her voice that is impossible for him not to hear.

Enjolras closes his eyes, still kneading his forehead with his fingers. He doesn't understand any of it – how did they find him, and why on earth did they think Eponine was with him? How did she happen to be there in the first place? What could have possibly instigated such violence, over a girl quitting a simple job?

His stomach sinks into a guilty pit. This is his fault.

"Alright," he says. "Alright. This is what we're going to do. We're going to head back to the apartment, lock the doors, and call the police. Everything will be fine."

"No, Enjolras." Her voice would almost be gentle, if it weren't so hoarse. "_You're _going to head back to the apartment. _You're_ going to lock all the doors. And I'll have my things gone by Monday."

The bluntness of her declaration almost knocks as much air out of him as the violence he endured only minutes before. "What?"

"I almost got you killed," she says with finality, as if the decision isn't even open for negotiation.

"Because of something I told you to do," Enjolras snaps back in an instant. "You're overreacting. You're not moving out."

She leans forward, just barely, and then her eyes catch the weak light – he can see her now, but he is in enough darkness that he is sure she can't see him. Cast in this gloom, there is something unquestionably bare and gritty about her, as if she were born in these shadows, as if she is a mere shadow herself. He has the irrational thought that if he were to reach out for her now she would be as intangible as one.

He expects an argument. He's ready for one. Despite the pulsing pain in his knee and the ache in his head growing more persistent by the second, he is ready to fight however long it takes to convince her she is wrong.

Instead she moves closer to him, enveloped again by the shadows, out of his line of sight.

"I'm glad that I met you," she says.

After she takes off he tries to chase her, but her footfalls are so silent and precise that he doesn't have a prayer. He is not stupid enough to call out for her; still, he opens his mouth, letting the shape of her name die on his lips. He stands there for a minute more. She won't return. In the end he has no choice but to muddle his way through the darkness and find his way back home.

* * *

Eponine doesn't come home that night. Enjolras all but guards her bedroom door, anticipating that she will try and sneak in to grab her stuff and go, but come Monday she still hasn't returned like she said she would. He wants to call their friends and ask around to see if anyone has a shred of information about where she might be, but he can't imagine she would involve any of them in this if she could help it.

Eventually he has to go to class, and that's when she strikes. He isn't gone for more than an hour, but that is all the time she needs to deflate the air mattress, clear out the bathroom cabinet, and grab what few things she owns.

She disappears so efficiently that he thinks she must have never planned on staying. It is all too convenient, too tidy, too quick.

He avoids their friends for days. His classmates stare openly at the black eye he is sporting, and the pretty girl from study group clucks over him and offers him ibuprofen but doesn't pester him too much when he says he doesn't want to talk about it. She asks him again about coffee, and this time he says yes, and it is only as the pretty girl walks away that he realizes two things: he is furious with Eponine. And he has no inkling of this other girl's name.

It turns out her name is Bethany, and she is in law school to pursue her dream of protecting endangered species and their habitats. She has this uncertain little laugh that tapers off at the end of her every sentence that isn't unpleasant, and when they meet up she lets her hair out of the severe braid that she usually wears to class. It suits her nicely, framing her wide eyes behind the lenses of her glasses.

They spend a lot of time talking. Or at least she does. She tells him about her family, about living as an army brat and moving from place to place all through her childhood, about a band she really loves that might visit the campus to put on a show. Enjolras nods often and tries to pay for her coffee and she says, complete with the little laugh at the end, "Only if you let me pay for the next one."

"Alright," he agrees.

And that is how he ends up meeting her for coffee the next week as well.

Every day he calls Eponine, and every day he gets a robot voicemail telling him to leave a message. He always hangs up. She knows why he's calling.

It's Cosette who ends up texting him first, asking if he can let Eponine know that she's been trying to get in touch. Enjolras feels a ball at the base of his throat tighten as he reads. He does not want to worry about her, and her reckless way of ripping herself in and out of his carefully organized life.

A week after she disappears he finds her key in his mailbox. He holds it in his fist so tightly that he can feel the little jagged metal bits cutting into his skin.

That night he goes to the Corner Bar, where a sullen, twentysomething hipster has replaced Eponine behind the bar. When Enjolras asks for her the bartender curtly informs him that Eponine no longer works there, and no, he has no idea where she works now.

Enjolras stops looking after that. He does not appreciate the gnawing unease he feels in his chest for her, but it does not change his circumstances: he is in the throes of his first and most difficult year of law school, and competing with some of the brightest and most driven students in the nation for a few coveted summer internships. He cannot extend himself any further than that, and so he tells himself to drop it.

Instead he starts spending his nights in the libraries and holed up in student lounges, poring over his notes and picking apart every precedent case at length with his study group. He ignores all the texts from his group of friends. He frequently jerks awake to find that he has fallen asleep in corner desks, in library lounge chairs, in coffee shops by the campus.

He hates being in the apartment.

Eponine left her teakettle behind, and it's the first thing he sees when he walks in, and the last thing he sees before he leaves each morning.

The mid-semester exams loom like a tidal wave over their heads, and Enjolras spends less and less time in the apartment. Instead he spends a lot of time with Bethany. She is a serious and studious girl, and the closer they get to their exams, the more he comes to appreciate her drive and actual enthusiasm for the law. He doesn't have as much of a passion for it himself – law school is more of a means to an end for him – but it is refreshing to spend time with someone so passionate, someone who still color codes her notes, someone who is not yet nearly as cynical or jaded as the rest of his classmates are.

When Enjolras stumbles mentally spent out of the exam room, Bethany is standing by the water fountain, trying very hard to make it look like she hasn't been waiting for him.

"We should celebrate," she says, and then the little laugh, predictable as ever. She shrugs a little bit like it doesn't mean much to her and says, "Maybe tonight? The ABC Café? It's kind of tucked away … "

"I've heard of it," he says.

She purses her lips and looks up at him expectantly. "It's cool if you're busy, Fletcher gave us a lot of reading anyway, so …"

It's painful to watch her stand there, awkwardly propped against the water fountain, knowing that whatever he says next will make or break her day.

"Sure," he says.

It's easier in the moment not to disappoint her. But as soon as her face lights up and she starts rattling off a time and a place they should meet Enjolras feels a premonition of guilt. He has not meant to give her false hope. He is already certain, despite the sweetness in the apples of her cheeks, despite her innocent disposition and her admirable drive, he will never fall in love with Bethany.

Courfeyrac would mock him. Even overly-sentimental Jehan would raise a skeptical brow. He knows it seems ridiculous to rule Bethany out so permanently, but he cannot imagine a life with her, cannot imagine anything past friendly conversations over coffee and the shared burden of studying for exams. He knows from past experience that feelings like this don't change over time.

Still, he goes to the café with her. It actually pretty dingy and reeks of smoke and whiskey, but there's a room in the back that isn't nearly as populated. They order fish and chips to split and two beers and either Bethany is a lightweight or she has been waiting for an excuse to graze her knees against his under the table, which happens repeatedly and often in the hour that they spend there together. Enjolras doesn't move his leg to discourage her, and he isn't sure why.

She parked her car outside his apartment so they could walk to the café together and not have to navigate parking on the downtown strip, so she follows him home and he walks her to her car.

"Is that your apartment?" she asks, pointing toward the spot where his car is parked.

He nods. It's getting rather cold out, but it would be rude to leave her before she gets into her car. "Yeah."

She stares at his door for a moment, and then back at him. A few beats pass.

"Well, I had a great time tonight," she says. "See you tomorrow?"

It's a Thursday, and they have class, so he undoubtedly will. "Yeah."

And then she leans forward and her eyes slide shut. It's different this time. He sees her intentions, and there are a few quick but well-defined moments that he could choose to pull away.

His heart does not constrict. His limbs do not stiffen. There is nothing complicated, nothing that aches, nothing to rationalize or explain away.

The kiss is chaste and lingering, and when she pulls away from him she is smiling bashfully. "See you tomorrow," she says again, her voice an octave higher than it was the first time. She tumbles into her car and waves daintily with her fingers as she drives away.

Enjolras turns around to walk back into the apartment, and finds himself face-to-face with Eponine.

At first he flinches. It is like running into a ghost. He feels this unmistakable sense of guilt, as if he has been caught – but it is quickly replaced by irritation. Of course even in this private moment she is ever present, staring at him with those eyes full of tricks, her mouth in a creased into an unreadable sideways line.

"What do you want?" he says, almost under his breath, walking toward the apartment.

He expects her to be offended by his harsh reaction to her. He wants her to be. He wants her to feel a shred of the annoyance that he feels for her, for her selfishness, her carelessness, her inability to fathom how she occupies his thoughts.

Instead there is a hop in her step as she follows him to the door. "My teakettle," she says.

He unlocks the door, and misses it on the first try. Frustrated, all too aware of her watching eyes on his back, he jams it back into the door and jerks and manipulates it until the door springs open.

"Go ahead, then," he says, gesturing into the apartment.

She walks in carefully, and grabs the kettle while he watches her from the door. He doesn't think it can really be this easy. That she will come in here, grab the stupid kettle, and leave without a word of apology or explanation. But she looks up at him curiously as she makes her way out.

"Your girlfriend … she's very pretty," says Eponine, in a conciliatory way. As if this misplaced compliment will somehow soften him.

He should tell her the truth, but he doesn't. "Is that all you needed, then?" he asks.

She is still walking toward the door, and stops at a distance that is entirely too close to him. She is always doing that. Leaning and pressing and inflicting the heat of her body, the smell of her skin. He wants to take a step back but doesn't want to give her the satisfaction of knowing she has any effect on him at all.

"I know you're angry with me," she says, and then he feels absurd, his coldness to her now seeming exaggerated and unnecessary. "It's alright. You should be."

"I'm not angry with you," he says through his teeth.

She laughs at him. It is low but full, nothing like Bethany's hesitant taper. "You should hear yourself." The front door is still open, and she looks out at the parking lot, at the neat cars all parked in a row, settled in for the night. For a split second he thinks that this is it, she's really just going to leave, but then she looks up at him and says, "My father and his friends were arrested. They're in jail. For now."

Enjolras can't help but ask: "Montparnasse, too?"

Eponine shakes her head. "Actually, he's the one who warned me about it. Otherwise I wouldn't have been there to … well." She shrugs with just one of her shoulders, and he is suddenly remembering the almost inhuman look in her eyes, of the how the darkness cast shadows on her pale face when he looked up from the ground and saw her standing above him with the broken bottle clutched in both of her hands.

"I suppose you've been staying with him, then."

"Yeah," she says. She itches at her collarbone. "He took a big risk doing that, you know. They're all pretty pissed at him now."

Enjolras doesn't say anything.

"I really am sorry," she says. "I didn't imagine – I never thought they'd hurt _you_."

"Why did they even think you were with me that night?" Enjolras asks.

Eponine's expression is sheepish. "I talked about you a lot. I guess they all thought … " She makes some vague, unhelpful gesture at him and says, "It doesn't matter." Her eyebrows shoot up and her mouth twitches at the corner. "So tell me about your girlfriend."

"Are you really going to stay with him?" Enjolras asks.

Eponine's mouth falls open just slightly. "Who, 'Parnasse?" she says after she recovers herself. She looks up at the ceiling, and he detects some exasperation in her voice when she says, "Not permanently, no. Of course not."

He wants to tell her to move back in. He wants to tell her she's a jerk for disappearing again, and an idiot for getting mixed up with Montparnasse, but mostly he wants to tell her that she should come back, because the apartment is the wrong kind of quiet now that she is gone.

It shouldn't be hard to say, but it is, and he feels like a coward when it comes out with half of the intention he meant to give it: "I didn't want you to move out."

She shakes her head, her curtain of hair obscuring her eyes. She pushes it back impatiently and says, with a sincerity and ease that startles him, "I care about you, Enjolras. You're a good person, a good friend. You deserve to be happy and safe and kiss pretty girls in the parking lot without wondering if you're going to get jumped."

He knows she means to be kind. He cannot explain why her words feel so vindictive, like she is using them to punish him. He is not a good person, at least not the person she has built him up to be; he ignores his friends and strings along perfectly nice girls and sabotages himself at every turn. And besides, he doesn't care about happy. He doesn't care about safe. He cares about _her_, and for the life of him he wishes he could just shake her off, but it's too late for that.

He doesn't answer her, because he can't put words to this feeling, because he cannot ask her to come back without compromising the very last shred of his dignity – he already knows she won't.

She gives him this ridiculous half-salute and tells him not to be a stranger, and then leaves again, the teakettle swinging childishly from her pumping arms as she goes.

* * *

Enjolras doesn't see Eponine for a month. He learns through Marius that she eventually moved into a tiny utility apartment above the convenience store downtown, but he never finds out anything more because he never asks – and neither does anyone else. For all their antics in the beginning, for all of the jokes that they made at his expense about living with Eponine, after she moves out nobody says a word to him about it. He is too self-conscious to wonder what they're thinking and so he throws his focus elsewhere.

He ends up snagging the coveted internship he wanted, which will keep him busy the entire summer in New York. He continues studying, and continues seeing Bethany, because she is kind and smart and he can't think of a good reason not to.

That being said, he still sees his old friends. He does not turn down a single invitation, even when parties are held for the flimsiest of excuses. There's a "The Apartment Finally Has a Functioning Refrigerator Again" party, a "Cosette Got Into the Nursing School" party and even a "Get Rid Of All the Alcohol From All The Other Parties" themed party, which is a veritable shit show, but merely foreshadows the disaster that is St. Patrick's Day.

If he is being perfectly honest with himself, Enjolras attends these raucous affairs because there is some masochistic hope in him that he will see Eponine there. But she seems to be anticipating this. He knows it sounds self-absorbed, but he is starting to think that she is very specifically and intentionally avoiding him, because everyone else seems to have heard from her and nobody remarks on her absences.

But she is there on St. Patrick's Day. She looks ridiculous, in green flannel pajama pants and a green chunky knit sweater, and this pathetic glittery headband with green corkscrews poking out of it. She arrives late and is already sloppily drunk, drunker than he's ever seen her, but she is animated and lively and grinning profusely so he doesn't worry about it. In fact, if anything, he resents the way she walks in, so happy and at ease with herself, immediately settling ungracefully into Grantaire's lap and impishly teasing everyone she sees.

Except Enjolras. Her dark eyes sweep the room and meet his but she always tears them away, pointedly not lingering. Her every gesture and drunken squeal is ostentatious, like she is putting on a show; he thinks that it's for his benefit, and then he realizes with a resentment that tastes bitter in the back of his throat that no, it is not for him.

Cosette is not here tonight, having left early for Spring Break. Every swivel of Eponine's hips, every coy look and happy crow – it is all for Marius. And it is so painfully obvious that Enjolras feels stupid for thinking she even considered his presence here in the first place.

The night wears on in its usual fashion. Courfeyrac and Jehan are blackout but thoroughly enjoying themselves by pinching any unfortunate soul who isn't wearing green. Joly and Bossuet are doing a terrible job of being subtle about not being able to keep their hands off of each other. Grantaire might just be the soberest one in attendance, seeing as his tolerance for alcohol is above and beyond anyone else's. The rest of the lot are making an unholy racket out on the deck, and there are at least a dozen and a half wasted strangers and Enjolras might just be tipsy enough that he can't remember any of them arriving.

Marius and Eponine are giggling in the corner, pressed shoulder to shoulder against each other, their faces so close that their foreheads are practically touching. Eponine is so far gone that every inch of her exposed skin is flushed, and when she laughs she throws her head back with such careless force that she smacks her head against the wall with a thud and doesn't even seem to notice. Her hair is in tangles, her brow slick with sweat, her baggy outfit in unsightly green rumples with a noticeable wine stain on the sleeve.

"Aaah, I have to pee," she announces, practically crawling up the wall to balance herself. She runs a sloppy hand through Marius's hair and says, "Don't go anywhere."

"Aye aye," he drunkenly agrees, waving her off as she goes.

Enjolras stays on the couch, and stares down into the murky contents of his punch. He is maybe a little bit drunk as well. But he is clear-headed and in control of himself, so he really has no excuse when he suddenly stands up and walks to the bathroom door.

It doesn't take more than a minute for her to come out. When she sees him she has lost all pretense of avoiding him. Her eyes light up and she pitches forward, her skinny arms flailing, enveloping him in a hug. Her cheek is pressed against his chest. She squeezes him, hard.

"Enjolras," she sighs happily. "I missed you."

His arms are motionless at his sides, but she doesn't seem to notice, still smiling wolfishly. She pats his shoulder and is about to walk away from him, back into the party, but he takes hold of her wrist.

She blinks up at him, her eyes watery and drunk.

"You're making a fool of yourself," he says lowly.

She doesn't even try to pretend not to know what he's talking about. The scowl on her face is exaggerated and fast, betraying her long before she can.

"Let go," she hisses, jerking her wrist out of his grasp.

He is barely holding her, so she jerks her hand away with too much force and she stumbles in surprise. She doesn't look back and he watches her go, snaking her way through the hall and back into the living room, feeling his heart hammer in his throat.

He instantly regrets it, the entire exchange. The thoughtless way she wrapped her arms around him, as if there were no history between them, as if she hasn't been intentionally lurking at the edges of his life for a month now. And then her callousness, her stupidity, the way she laughs too loudly at Pontmercy's jokes and swats at him too familiarly and seems to drink in his pores when she stares.

She's a stupid kid. He should not need reminding. She is nineteen, and young, and infatuated, and most of all, she is_ not_ his problem.

He stands there for a moment, trying to master his irritation with her. Once the heat of his anger has settled in his veins and he is reasonably certain that his expression is neutral again, he walks down the hall and back into the party. He doesn't mean to look over to the corner, but even in the periphery he can tell that Marius is still sitting alone, and Eponine is nowhere to be seen.

He hazards a glance around the apartment, but by then he already knows she's gone. He doesn't bother checking the back deck. In a few swift steps he dodges the drunken partygoers and gets to the front door, figuring she can't have gone far.

He hasn't made it ten steps out when he hears a little gasp, and sees her guilty eyes flashing up at his in the dark. There is a cigarette poised in her hand, a lighter in the other. Her fingers are quaking uncontrollably and he can tell from one glance that she's been trying to get a light and has failed more than a few times before he found her.

"Seriously?" he asks her, his voice terse and uncharitable.

She juts out her chin at him, in a ridiculous show of self-righteousness. "What?" she asks sullenly. Her words are thick. When she's this drunk she is as intolerable and bratty as a child. "What the fuck else do you want?"

In two more steps he is directly in front of her. She does not flinch or move her head away, her mouth in a defiant little knot, her wiry body tense in anticipation as if she is ready for a fight. She is not expecting him to yank the lighter out of her hand, so he takes it easily, and chucks it across the parking lot where it skids under a car and out of sight.

She opens her mouth to shout at him, but they hear laughter erupting from the back deck and she thinks the better of it.

"I get it," she says. "You're older, you're _smarter_, you're _better_ – "

"Right now I am," he says. "Get ahold of yourself, Eponine. He has a _girlfriend_."

"I didn't – " She's flustered now, her fingers curling around the unlit cigarette, bending it until the paper creases. "I wasn't – I wouldn't have done anything," she says, and now she is angry again, and her anger makes her more coherent than ever. "I'm perfectly aware of where I stand with him, I don't need you to come out here and spell it out for me."

"Apparently you do," he says, feeling an unfamiliar heat rising up in his neck and cheeks, goading him to press her further.

She rounds on her heels and starts walking away, her strides clumsy but purposeful – she is so drunk she can barely keep herself in a straight line, but she still moves fast, faster than he expects.

"Don't _follow_ me," she snaps at him.

He matches her stride easily, his steps almost twice the length of hers. "You're drunk."

"No shit."

He isn't going to apologize. "Just come back to the party," he says, because now that he has practically driven her out and she is more reckless and bent on finding trouble than ever he cannot help but feel responsible for her. She was happy a few minutes ago. She was stupid, but she was happy. Why can't he ever just leave her be?

She doesn't say a word, just abruptly switches directions, stumbling a bit as she does.

"Come on," he says, meaning to be kind, instead sounding impatient and tense.

The stupid little green corkscrews on her headband have wilted and are now tangled hopelessly in the knots of her hair. It is both pathetic and endearing, how she throws herself into the smallest of things, how she revels in cheap distractions and celebrates holidays with too much enthusiasm and will let anybody talk her ear off over the stupidest of things. But in this moment it is only pathetic.

She stops and turns around so unexpectedly that he doesn't stop his motion and her head barrels into his chest. She is so unsteady that he doesn't move, feeling the weight and pressure of her against him and fearing that if he does she'll only lose her balance, but then she doesn't pull away. She just stands there with her forehead very intentionally planted into his chest, breathing hard.

Her voice is uncertain and thick, muffled by his shirt: "Does _everybody_ know?"

He looks down at the mop of untamed curls. He doesn't want to hurt her. That has never been his intention. "No," he says, but of course he's lying. "Actually – I don't know. Nobody ever talks to me."

This earns one wheeze of a laugh from her, stilted and brief. He thinks that maybe she will move now, that she will take a step back from him and the argument will continue and she'll walk away just as determinedly as she was five seconds before, but she stays, her face buried in his shirt as if he is an outlet for her shame.

He is stiff and confused and doesn't know what to do, except not to move, because it feels like she needs this and she has never needed anything from him before.

Her words are so tired and blunt that it takes him a moment to process what she has said.

"I don't want you to hate me."

The rest of him reacts before his brain does. He feels his arms wrap around her, feels the smallness of her body finally relaxing against his, and he is relieved because he doesn't think he'll be able to do justice with words.

"Well, I don't."

She lets him hold her there, and so he stays. It may be the longest she has ever been quiet around him. In the distance he can hear drunken undergraduates spilling out into the night, music booming from nearly every window of the dorms, but the two of them are silent and steady and still. He's afraid she might be crying and he knows from past experience that he is useless when it comes to tears, but when she pulls away from him she is clear-eyed and resolute.

"It's just a silly crush," she says, shrugging her skinny shoulders, staring into his chest.

Enjolras's mouth forms a tight line.

"It's just – he was nice to me. He always has been. Before anyone else was."

Now she's looking up at him, the barest of smiles on her lips. He can never keep up with her. She is as unpredictable as a flame.

She presses her arms to her chest, her muscles rigid as if she is trying to keep something from spilling out of her. "It'll be fine," she says, in an ambiguous and quiet way that does nothing to convince either of them that it's the truth.

He doesn't know what possesses him to be so forward. He was acutely aware of his own drunkenness only minutes before, but now he feels entirely right in his mind, his thoughts orderly and clear.

"The room is still open, you know," he says, and as soon as he does he feels an unmistakable crush in his ribcage, already anticipating the embarrassment of her rejection.

She licks her upper lip. "I have a place."

"So you like it there."

She pushes one of her shoulders forward, the wobbly gesture meant to communicate some sort of ambivalence. She is vague and faraway now, already dissociating from the conversation, already retreated to some place where he can't reach her.

"We made rules," she finally says. And then her brows perk up a little sheepishly, a little chagrined. "I don't think I can keep them anymore."

It isn't hard to glean the meaning of her words. He thinks of the pick-up truck idling outside of the apartment, of her defensiveness, of the way Montparnasse wraps his arm around her so possessively and how her small body will sometimes lean into his, two skinny curves fitting into each other with ease. Of course she wants a place to herself. She knows he would never agree to letting Montparnasse spend the night.

"That's fair," he says, his voice tight.

She nods just once, more to herself than to him, as if she has come to some private sort of understanding. When she looks back up she seems less confident about looking him in the eyes. "Well," she says, her voice suddenly quiet.

He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets. "Well, just for tonight, then," he says, because he's an idiot, because he's had too much to drink, because it doesn't even matter but he can't for the life of him stop himself from trying.

She waves him off. "I'm fine."

"You're drunk."

"Not incapacitated," she says, cocking her head toward the bus stop.

He's too tired for this. He can practically feel a premonition of tomorrow's hangover aching in the rims of his eyes. "Eponine."

The sound of him saying her name is what finally seems to break her resolve.

"Well," she says. Then she gestures toward her unsightly green getup. "I guess I'm basically in my pajamas anyway."

It's the closest thing he'll get to a yes. And even though she's only staying the night – even though this is not her first choice or even her second – when she resolutely turns in the direction of his apartment and starts walking in that determined way of hers, without so much as glancing back to see if he is following, he cannot help but feel some measure of relief. They have come to a resolution. And when he steps forward to follow her and releases a breath it feels as though he has been holding it for a very long time.

* * *

Guys. I know it's been like forever since I updated but like just for perspective on how hard I'm trying to crank this shiz out I literally haven't watched television in MONTHS and I LOVE TELEVISION MORE THAN ANYTHING. My Netflix account is crying. All I do is go to work and rehearsal and write this story and write complainy author's notes. Thank you so much for all your feedback! Happy new year :)


End file.
